Ehrhard Bahr,
Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
ISBN: 978 0 520 25128 1
US$39.95 (hb)
358pp
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism is the forty-first title in the University of California Press’ series Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism. For film studies, the more obvious title from this series is the sixth, Thomas J. Saunders’ Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany (1994), because it is more directly about the relation between ‘Weimar culture’ and film production.

Bahr’s book is more complicated in that it is about “the crisis of modernism and the creative solutions offered by a loosely assembled group of exiles that settled in Los Angeles during the 1940s” (20). Of this group, only Bertolt Brecht had enough contact with Hollywood filmmakers for Bahr to devote a chapter to film, specifically, one film, Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die (USA 1943). Indeed, Bahr devotes three chapters to Brecht’s work in LA; his discussion of Hangmen explains Brecht’s unhappiness with the final product in terms of conflict, ‘Epic Theater versus Film Noir’. Theodor Adorno is a major figure throughout the book, in particular because of his influence on Thomas Mann and because of his interpretation of Arnold Schoenberg’s work and significance. There are chapters each on Franz Werfel and Alfred Döblin, as well as the immigrant architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, along with Thomas Mann and Schoenberg.

There is also significant discussion of the political arguments among these, and other, German exiles elsewhere in the United States about ‘the two Germanys’, the failures of Weimar culture in relation to the rise of the Nazis, and the appropriate fate of Germany after the war. These men had different ideas as to why Weimar couldn’t prevent the fascist takeover and whether there were any ‘good Germans’ or only Nazis. In the end, of course, history decided there were only Nazis and so it was appropriate to force Germany into a total surrender rather than work with possible resistance fighters within Germany itself. And HUAC, Bahr suggests, led Brecht, Adorno, Mann, and Döblin to return to Europe.

Bahr concludes that “Weimar on the Pacific was unique. It was not simply a transplant of Weimar Germany to the West Coast of the United States, nor could its culture simply be returned to Central Europe after World War II. Weimar on the Pacific achieved its own identity between 1933 and 1958 and deserves its place among the global cityscapes of modernism” (300). While in LA, Max Horkheimer and Adorno wrote The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Brecht wrote Galileo, Werfel wrote The Song of Bernadette (yes, that one) as well as The Star of the Unborn, and Mann wrote Doctor Faustus, and Schoenberg wrote Kol Nidre and A Survivor from Warsaw, to name just a few of the exiles’ accomplishments of these years.

The list grows even longer if one considers work by women, which Bahr does just before his conclusion. Although “traditional patriarchal culture resurfaced in exile, and women were not given the recognition that they deserved” (295), Bahr does mention work by writers Vicki Baum and Salka Viertel, and the women associated with Brecht (such as Helene Weigel and Ruth Berlau), acknowledging that they have received little attention, despite the fact that “in general, women were more successful as screenwriters than their male colleagues” (296). He also refers to Salka Viertel’s important role as hostess of a salon in the tradition “of the history of Jewish salons, which were started by Rahel Levin Varnhagen” in the nineteenth century (296). Viertel’s salon has in fact been mentioned in autobiographies and other histories of life in LA in the 1930s, so it is nice to get a little different perspective on her.

For older film scholars and others interested in Frankfurt School theory and its proponents, there is material to chew on, and obviously specialists in the various figures whom Bahr singles out for study will be grateful for the information that he provides. Little bits here and there might help film scholars particularly interested in the role that European immigrants and exiles played in developing Hollywood cinema. For example, one-year “contracts were a courtesy extended by the movie industry to some of the more prominent exiles, since such documents of prospective of [sic] employment . . . were a requirement to obtain a visa into the United States. . . . Such one-year contracts . . . were issued for the purpose of rescue and did not generally lead to long-term employment” (199). Overall, Bahr has a thesis to argue that justifies bringing together such disparate material, and his information is of interest to a variety of communities, but Weimar on the Pacific is not especially pertinent to general film scholars.

Harriet Margolis,
Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Created on: Monday, 3 December 2007