Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism
Ehrhard Bahr
Abstract
In the 1930s and 1940s, 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 ... More
In the 1930s and 1940s, 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. This is the first book to examine these artists and intellectuals as a group. It looks at selected works of Adorno, Schoenberg, Brecht, Lang, Mann, Max Horkheimer, Richard Joseph Neutra, Rudolph Michael Schindler, and Alfred Döblin, and weighs Los Angeles's influence on them and their impact on German modernism. Touching on such examples as film noir and Mann's Doctor Faustus, the book shows how this community of exiles reconstituted modernism in the face of the traumatic political and historical changes they were living through.
Keywords:
Los Angeles,
German intellectuals,
Thomas Mann,
Theodore W. Adorno,
Bertolt Brecht,
Arnold Schoenberg,
Nazi Germany,
Weimar Germany,
modernism,
Doctor Faustus
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2007 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780520251281 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: March 2012 |
DOI:10.1525/california/9780520251281.001.0001 |
