name a concept funnier than "Brecht in LA." I'll wait

December 15, 2019 10:10 PM

"Indeed, at no time, perhaps, was the city’s surreal admixture of improbable light and equally improbable darkness (sunshine and noir, in other words) more startling than during that very time, the thirties and forties, when hundreds, perhaps thousands of Weimar-era German-speaking exiles (Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Alfred Döblin, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schoenberg and Salka Viertel, among them) fled the killing fields of World War II Europe and found themselves in a city of angels nestled along the cerulean pool of the Pacific."

When the Frankfurt School took residence in Southern California from 1942 to 1952, their presence created one of the great overlooked situational comedies of the twentieth century. Let none other than Bertolt Brecht serve as your tour guide to Los Angeles:

On thinking about Hell, I gather
My brother Shelley found it to be a place
Much like the city of London. I
Who live in Los Angeles and not in London
Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be
Still more like Los Angeles.

(...)

In Hell too
There are, I’ve no doubt, these luxuriant gardens
With flowers as big as trees, which of course whither
Unhesitantly if not nourished with very expensive water. And fruit markets
With great heaps of fruit, albeit having
Neither smell nor taste. And endless processions of cars
Lighter than their own shadows, faster than
Mad thoughts, gleaming vehicles in which
Jolly-looking people come from nowhere and are nowhere bound […]

—from “On Thinking about Hell”

(Kalifornienträumen: Bertolt Brecht’s Los Angeles Poems and Other Sunstruck Germanic Specters)

Imagine Brecht, the grim pioneer of epic theater, entombed alive in the "mausoleum of easy going."

Unlike quite a few of his compatriots, who were enamored of the ocean breezes and lush vegetation, Brecht was no fan of Southern California. “Almost nowhere has my life ever been harder than here in this mausoleum of easy going,” he wrote in his journal soon after his arrival, rendering the expression in English. “I feel as if I had been exiled from our era,” he observed a little later, “this is Tahiti in the form of a big city.” In a letter to Korsch, he lamented: “My intellectual isolation here is horrendous; compared to Hollywood, Svendborg was a metropolis.” (...)

As he wrote in a poem composed soon after his arrival in Southern California:

Every day to earn my daily bread
I go to the market, where lies are bought
Hopefully
I take my place among the sellers.

(The Poet of Ill Tidings)

An alternate translation of that oft-quoted verse from Hollywood Elegies brings out Brecht's desperation to, in the land of screenwriters, make a living for himself.

Every day, I go to earn my bread
In the exchange where lies are marketed,
Hoping my own lies will attract a bid.

That verse's translator, Adam Kirsch, presents one reason the Teutonic presence in the Valley comes across so jarring to the American: the idea that "history is something that takes place elsewhere."

Because I was born and raised in Los Angeles, I’ve always been fascinated by the stories of the German writers and composers who took shelter there during the Nazi period. If you grow up in la, it doesn’t take long to figure out that history is something that takes place elsewhere. That’s why the idea of Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades or Bertolt Brecht in Santa Monica, places I knew as a child, is so powerfully strange. These artists came at the end of an infinitely complex, self-conscious, and tragic cultural tradition. Yet they were living in a place that was (and maybe still is) synonymous with democratic opportunity and natural benevolence—the very qualities that drew my own grandparents to Southern California, from Brooklyn, during the wwii years.

(Translator’s Note: 'Hollywood Elegies' by Bertolt Brecht)

As unlikely as it is to imagine the author of rigorously European novel The Magic Mountain sunbathing in SoCal, Thomas Mann reputedly loved it there. Others, like Leonhard Frank, pined mistakenly for the Old World.

ROLL the name Thomas Mann around and what comes to mind? Death in Venice, fever in the Alps, a family fortune squandered under leaden provincial skies. What probably does not come to mind is a stucco house and rustling tropical garden perched high in the lush hills of west Los Angeles.

“Where I am, there is Germany,” the Nobel prize-winning novelist intoned — and for 10 happy years, from 1942 to 1952, a German-speaking community flourished amid the palms and bougainvillea of the Riviera neighborhood of Pacific Palisades. (...)

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that the German expressionist writer Leonhard Frank, after arriving in Los Angeles in 1933, came to the park every evening to stare at the ocean. “Europe is over there,” he told a stranger, “and I cannot separate myself from it.” When the stranger informed him that actually Asia was over there, Frank rose from his bench and wandered off. (...)

Left-wing but diplomatic, the Feuchtwangers were a bridge between the revolutionary Brecht and the stodgy Thomas Mann, and at the villa their two hostile circles intersected. (...)

Thomas Mann was the exile who loved Los Angeles best — so much that he became an American citizen and planned to live out his years there (disgust with McCarthyism impelled him to leave for Switzerland in 1952). Mann had always adored the Mediterranean, and to him Los Angeles was the next best thing. “I was enchanted by the light,” he rhapsodized, “by the special fragrance of the air, by the blue of the sky, the sun, the exhilarating ocean breeze. ...”

It would have been lovely to gaze on the window of his study — but alas, when I arrived at 1550 San Remo Drive in Pacific Palisades, I discovered the house is almost entirely concealed by an enormous hedge. Still, as I peered down the shadowy drive, I could imagine “Goethe in Hollywood,” as The New Yorker styled Mann in a 1941 profile, wrestling the dense, allusive pages of “Doctor Faustus” into shape.

(When Weimar Luminaries Went West Coast)

Yes, you can still just walk up to Thomas Mann's house at 1550 San Remo Drive in the Pacific Palisades. As none other than Susan Sontag did in 1947.

No tour buses made their way up San Remo Drive, but occasionally fans would appear on Mann’s doorstep. One day, a teen-age boy called on the phone, having found the author’s number under “M” in the phone book. He and his female friend were invited to tea. A pleasant but awkward conversation ensued, with Mann asking the kids about their studies and answering questions about his work. “Both the heights and the depths of the German soul are reflected in its music,” Mann said, apropos of “Doctor Faustus,” his latest work. “Wagner,” the girl sagely replied. She was Susan Sontag, and four decades later she recounted the episode in a story for this magazine. One delightful detail is that Sontag and her friend, Merrill, arrived two hours early and sat in their car a little ways from the house, rehearsing their encounter with the “god in exile.”

(Will Thomas Mann’s House Be Demolished?)

Susan Sontag, possibly at that time the smartest high-schooler in the nation, feared she might even injure the "god in exile" with her stupidity.

I had the impression that Thomas Mann could be injured by Merrill’s stupidity or mine… that stupidity was always injuring, and that as I revered Mann it was my duty to protect him from this injury.

(Pilgrimage)

But don't believe everything Sontag writes about her encounter. According to her biographer, Benjamin Moser, her writing masks a tangle of shame at both her homosexuality and Mann's in another classically Californian play of sunshine and noir.

Benjamin Moser goes over this episode in his fascinating biography “Sontag: Her Life and Work” and pieces another story out of her manuscripts and diaries, as well as Mann’s diaries. Sontag was not in high school when she went, but in college. The afternoon was an evening and was in 1949. There were not two visitors but three, and none were linked romantically. A novel she describes as awaiting publication, “Faustus,” was already published by then, and she had shoplifted her copy from a store.

This all could as easily have been presented by Moser as a reason to shame Sontag, but in his hands it becomes a story about the shame and what she was trying to hide. She had just begun her first affair with a woman. She was forcing herself to be bisexual, was ambivalent about her Jewish identity, and would shortly marry her teacher at the University of Chicago, the sociologist Philip Rieff.

As Moser says, “The facts were fake. But the shame was real.” He sees in what she sought to hide the emotional truth of fiction — about her sexuality and also Mann’s.

(Review: Biographer pulls back the curtain on Susan Sontag’s life)

Take a stroll in the unlikely footsteps of the Frankfurt School in LA. With the stops described in Hollywood Haven and the map of Arnold Schoenberg's Los Angeles, anyone can plan their own route to Frank's "actually, Asia is over there" bench, accompanied by Mann's Faust on the beach, walking among Brecht's angels in Hell.

posted by Rich Text (9 comments total)

I sometimes wonder if, had Zweig gone to LA rather than Petropolis, he would still have killed himself.
posted by praemunire at 10:19 PM on December 15, 2019 [4 favorites]

Andy Partridge did not like it
posted by thelonius at 4:44 AM on December 16, 2019

Christopher Hampton's play Tales From Hollywood is the most notable dramatization of this period. Hampton has the narrator and main character be Odon von Horvath, an Austro-Hungarian expat who fled Vienna to Paris and was thinking about moving to the US when he was killed in a freak accident (Tree branch fell on his head during a thunderstorm). Hampton has him survive the accident. The play was adapted for television in 1992 with Jeremy Irons as von Horvath.
One of the jokes in the play says that finding a connection between the exiles and the LA community would be as difficult as finding a connection between the Marx Brothers and Arnold Schoenberg. (They were actually cousins, which Hampton knows full well.)
posted by dannyboybell at 5:47 AM on December 16, 2019 [2 favorites]

The linked article is a good one, but I think maybe just a bit too ready to gesture towards the "funny" or "improbable" aspect of Brecht and company in LA rather than seeing the atmosphere as both encouraging their theories about mass entertainment, while also ultimately showing what they refused to accept that mass entertainment provides, which intellectualism doesn't. Hollywood is, in that sense, both the proof of their work and proof of its failings, which I guess is sorta funny if you're big on irony; the escapees confronting escapism.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:48 AM on December 16, 2019 [3 favorites]

Reminds me of that WTF moment reading my HS Western Music textbook mention that Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin were bestest buddies.

I've seen Dagmar Krause in concert sing some of the Eisler/Brecht Hollywood pieces. Her interpretation is quite stunning.
posted by ovvl at 9:27 AM on December 16, 2019 [1 favorite]

You know who else had some interesting reflections on exile in the US? Painter George Grosz, who had a prophetic dream and fled Germany. He lived in New York, but he had struggle to market himself as well. In German, his memoir is called A Little Yes And A Big No, which phrase I would like on my tombstone.

But anyway. He arrives in the US absolutely determined to succeed in the American style - paint advertising art, make connections, totally immerse himself in the American way of doing things....and he just barely ekes out a living and pretty much totally fails to Americanize himself. His memoir plays it all off like it's funny at the level of the sentence, but the overall tone of the memoir becomes so melancholy, it's just horribly sad.
posted by Frowner at 11:55 AM on December 16, 2019 [3 favorites]

I'll bite - how about "Bukowski in Berlin?"
posted by aspersioncast at 1:04 PM on December 16, 2019 [1 favorite]

CITY OF NETS is a great book about this era and Isherwood's own dairies about living in ex-pat Santa Monica crawling with lapsed Princesses and German academics are great.
posted by The Whelk at 9:10 PM on December 16, 2019 [3 favorites]

Bukowski would've been fine in Weimar Berlin.
posted by praemunire at 8:03 AM on December 17, 2019 [1 favorite]