An der Diss gesessen, am Schlussteil gearbeitet, am Hauptteil weiter rumgegraben. Jetzt wo ich einmal durch das komplette Werkverzeichnis durch bin, alles eingeordnet habe, die für mich wichtigen Werke in einen Kontext gesetzt habe und um sie herum noch ein bisschen Zusatzinfo verfasst habe – alleine die wichtige Ausstellung „Die Straßen Adolf Hitlers in der Kunst“ hat 26 Seiten und dabei habe ich mich noch recht kurz gefasst –, kommt jetzt das Finetuning. Über 100 Werke im Verzeichnis sind als verkauft annotiert worden. Denen werde ich nicht komplett hinterherspüren, aber wo die 29 Bilder zur Reichsautobahn gelandet sind, würde ich doch gerne wissen. Momentan kann ich leider nur 13 wirklich sicher verorten, bei mindestens fünf gehe ich davon aus, dass sie zerstört wurden. Wo der Rest ist: keine Ahnung. Deswegen googelte und suchte ich gestern mal wieder, was ich schon öfter getan habe und schrieb ein paar Mails an Menschen, die vielleicht mehr wissen. Und das war dann schon mein ganzer langer Tag.

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The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile

In diesem Artikel des New Yorker verbergen sich ungefähr fünf Bücher, in die ich jetzt dringend mal reingucken möchte. Es geht um die Künstler, Schriftsteller, Schauspieler etc. (m/w/d), die vor den Nationalsozialisten nach Kalifornien flohen und dort eine nicht immer unproblematische Gemeinschaft bildeten. Der Artikel ist auch als halbstündige Hörfassung auf der Site verlinkt.

„Nevertheless, even the most resourceful of the émigrés faced psychological turmoil. Whatever their opinion of L.A., they could not escape the universal condition of the refugee, in which images of the lost homeland intrude on any attempt to begin anew. They felt an excruciating dissonance between their idyllic circumstances and the horrors that were unfolding in Europe. Furthermore, they saw the all too familiar forces of intolerance and indifference lurking beneath America’s shining façades. To revisit exile literature against the trajectory of early-twentieth-century politics makes one wonder: What would it be like to flee one’s native country in terror or disgust, and start over in an unknown land? […]

At first, many of the exiles fled to France. Few of them believed that Hitler’s reign would last long, and a trip across the ocean seemed excessive. […] When, in 1940, Germany invaded France, Feuchtwanger was in dire danger of being captured by the Gestapo. His wife, Marta, helped arrange an elaborate escape, which required him to don a woman’s coat and shawl. That September, a motley group that included Franz Werfel, Alma Mahler, Heinrich Mann and his wife, Nelly, and Thomas Mann’s son Golo hiked across the Pyrenees, from France into Spain. Mahler carried a large bag containing several of her first husband’s manuscripts and the original score of Anton Bruckner’s Third Symphony. […]

Such doleful tales raise the question of why so many writers fled to L.A. Why not go to New York, where exiled visual artists gathered in droves? Ehrhard Bahr answers that the “lack of a cultural infrastructure” in L.A. was attractive: it allowed refugees to reconstitute the ideals of the Weimar Republic instead of competing with an extant literary scene. In addition, film work was an undeniable draw. Brecht’s anti-Hollywood invective hides the fact that he worked industriously to find a place as a screenwriter, and co-wrote Fritz Lang’s “Hangmen Also Die!” Even Thomas Mann flirted with Hollywood; there was talk of a film adaptation of “The Magic Mountain,” with Montgomery Clift as Hans Castorp and Greta Garbo as Clavdia Chauchat. […]

Franz Waxman fell into a career as a Hollywood composer after striking up a conversation with the director James Whale in Viertel’s living room. Brecht and Charles Laughton first met there. To be sure, not all of Viertel’s mediations panned out. She facilitated a legendarily unsuccessful meeting between Schoenberg and the studio head Irving Thalberg, who was seeking a composer for an adaptation of Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth.” As Viertel relates in her memoir, Schoenberg told Thalberg that he would need complete creative control, and that the actors would have to conform to pitches and rhythms specified in his score.

That story is often cited for comic effect, to illustrate the irreconcilability of European values with those of Hollywood. When Thalberg complimented Schoenberg on his “lovely music”—one of the composer’s less challenging scores had recently been played on the radio—Schoenberg snapped, “I don’t write lovely music.”“