Weimar on the Pacific

German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism

Ehrhard Bahr

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780520257955
• eBook ISBN: 9780520933804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals—including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg—who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism. Weimar Germany and its culture, with its meld of eighteenth-century German classicism and twentieth-century modernism, served as a touchstone for this group of diverse talents and opinions.

Weimar on the Pacific is the first book to examine these artists and intellectuals as a group. Ehrhard Bahr studies selected works of Adorno, Horkheimer, Brecht, Lang, Neutra, Schindler, Döblin, Mann, and Schoenberg, weighing Los Angeles's influence on them and their impact on German modernism. Touching on such examples as film noir and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, Bahr shows how this community of exiles reconstituted modernism in the face of the traumatic political and historical changes they were living through.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. The Dialectic of Modernism
• 2. Art and Its Resistance to Society:Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory
• 3. Bertolt Brecht’s California Poetry:Mimesis or Modernism?
• 4. The Dialectic of Modern Science: Brecht’s Galileo
• 5. Epic Theater versus Film Noir: Bertolt Brecht andFritz Lang’s Anti-Nazi Film Hangmen Also Die
• 6. California Modern as Immigrant Modernism:Architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph M. Schindler
• 7. Between Modernism and Antimodernism:Franz Werfel
• 8. Renegade Modernism: Alfred Döblin’s NovelKarl and Rosa
• 9. The Political Battleground of Exile Modernism:The Council for a Democratic Germany
• 10. Evil Germany versus Good Germany: Thomas Mann’sDoctor Faustus
• 11. A “True Modernist”: Arnold Schoenberg
• Conclusion: The Weimar Legacy of Los Angeles
• Chronology
• Appendices I–V
• I. Addresses of Weimar Exiles and Exile Institutionsin Los Angeles
• II. Filmography: Hangmen Also Die
• III. Text of the Kol Nidre
• IV. Lord Byron’s “Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte”
• V. Text of Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor of Warsaw
• Bibliography
• Index