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The Week in Germany: Culture

March 9, 2007

Pacific Palisades: Refuge for German Literati in the “Showroom of the Easygoing”

Lion Feuchtwanger in California

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Pacific Palisades became the address of a unique constellation of German writers and intellectuals who escaped persecution at home for their political affiliations or Jewish backgrounds.

An exhibit organized by the German Emigration Center in Bremerhaven and the Buddenbrookhaus in Lübeck follows the paths of ten writers who found refuge in southern California. Based on original documents and extensive photographic material, the exhibit offers a retrospective of these writers’ work that is linked to a reconstruction of the conditions of their lives under the Nazis and in Californian exile.

In the palm-shaded bungalows of this neighborhood that was once a movie lot for western films, writers like Bertolt Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Alfred Döblin, and Erich Maria Remarque wrote some of their finest works. Classics like Dr. Faustus (Thomas Mann), Arch of Triumph (Remarque), and Brecht’s legendary production of The Life of Galileo came into being during this period.

Ludwig Marcuse wrote biographies of Heine and Büchner before teaching literature at USC

While California offered an idyllic climate and protection from fascism, life was not easy for these exiled writers, many of whom were subject to suspicion of being communists during the “Red Scare” that followed World War II. “In almost no other place, has my life been as difficult as it is here in this showroom of the easygoing,” wrote Brecht, who was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Affairs Committee during in 1947. While some of the émigrés signed contracts to write for movie studios, few achieved the recognition in the US that they had had at home. Alfred Döblin, whose masterpiece Berlin, Alexanderplatz made him a heavyweight of German literature in 1929, eked out a meager existence on unemployment after his year-long contract with MGM ended.

The Buddenbrookhaus, once owned by the Mann family and now a literary museum, will host the exhibition until June 17, 2007.

For more information about exiled German authors in southern California, visit the Website of the Lion Feuchtwanger Library at USC.

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