Salka Viertel and German Exiles in Hollywood

The look, the sound, and the speech of Hollywood’s Golden Age did not originate in Hollywood. Much of it came from Europe, through the work of successive waves of immigrants during the first half of the 20th century. The last several of those waves brought a group of traumatized artists who were lucky enough to escape Hitler’s death trains and extermination camps. All were antifascists; a few were Communists; most were Jews. These were Hitler’s gift to America — prodigious individuals who enriched the film culture and the intellectual life of our nation, and whose influence continues to resonate. Plenty of writers have explored the ways these refugees, exiles and émigrés managed to escape from Europe. Fewer have told about the Americans who had the courage to take them in. Of those heroic citizens, at the top of the list for her uncompromising conviction and generosity, was a too-often-forgotten screenwriter in Santa Monica named Salka Viertel.

An estimated ten thousand refugees from Germany and Austria settled in greater Los Angeles between 1933 and 1941, a significant part of “the most complete migration of artists and intellectuals in European history” up to that time, according to California historian Kevin Starr. Members of Salka Viertel’s own family were among those refugees, as were hundreds of her friends and many more strangers. In Santa Monica, she made it her mission to provide a refuge for them in her own home and to absorb them into her social and professional network, all to help them survive in a wholly unfamiliar new world.

America’s own deeply rooted anti-Semitism, the eruptions of homegrown fascism that emerged in the 1930s with rallies sponsored by the Silver Shirts and the German American Bund, and widespread anti-immigrant sentiments stoked by such fearmongers as Father Coughlin were factors in the Roosevelt administration’s reluctance to alter strict immigration policies that had been further tightened during the Great Depression. While Roosevelt was not unsympathetic to the plight of Europe’s Jews, during the early years of his administration his chief concerns were domestic, focused on boosting employment and fostering an economic recovery. Later, after 1941, he concentrated almost exclusively on winning the war. And so it became clear that rescue for the Jews, as Hitler set out methodically to kill them all, was not likely to originate with U.S. government agencies. It would be individual efforts such as Salka Viertel’s, synchronized with organizations like Hollywood’s European Film Fund and Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee..

But Salka Viertel has been more or less forgotten in America, because too few people believed that what she accomplished was important. To survive and flourish in the hostile environment of the Hollywood studio system; to use her influence at the studios to petition for sponsors, affidavits and jobs for refugees; to turn her home into the endpoint of a transatlantic routing network for those refugees, providing welcome, food, shelter, camaraderie and introductions to potential employers; to speak out against intolerance, censorship, political inquisitions, and the curtailing of human rights in the name of national security — all seeds of fascism in the United States that threatened to sprout as poisonously as they had in Germany: in the end, none of this has been deemed thus far to be worthy of our attention. It was just one woman’s response to the events of her day — events that, clear as they may seem in hindsight, were as bewildering in their time as those in our time are to us.

What kept the luckiest of the 1930s refugees going, as Elie Wiesel wrote about Adam in the book of Genesis, is that God gave them a secret: not about how to begin, but how to begin again. Yet it was impossible to begin again without the help of people like Salka Viertel, who welcomed them into a community after their own had been eradicated.

It was a personal financial crisis that had brought Salka Viertel to California in 1928, and it was another that forced her to leave, in the early 1960s, to begin a self-imposed exile in the Swiss Alps. Both predicaments had come about through a larger political context, but they were not, in the end, a political story. They were, and are, a human story. A woman, finding good fortune in a foreign land, comforted and fed and housed the survivors of an overseas genocide. In her old age, when her fortune was gone, only a few family members and friends remained to feed and comfort her, and to remember her after her death. As witnesses to this story, we might ask again: what does it say about our values that we have chosen to dismiss so large and estimable a life as Salka Viertel’s?

Excerpted from  : The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Refugees Fleeing Nazi Germany Reshaped Hollywood. This Forgotten Woman Helped Make It Possible. By Donna Rifkind. Time , January 2 , 2020.

                      Ernst Lubitsch and Greta Garbo on the set of Ninotchka (1939), screenplay a.o. Billy Wilder 

Imagine this alternate history of movies: Had Hitler not become a political force during the 1920s and 1930s, Berlin rather than Hollywood could have been the epicenter of film. So many of Hollywood’s defining talents that emigrated — or fled — to Tinseltown before World War II spent their formative years in the Weimar capital.

Among them were actors and filmmakers Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau, Max Reinhardt and Billy Wilder, composers Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, and writers Vicky Baum, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and Franz Werfel. They were “Hitler’s gift to America,” writes longtime book reviewer Donna Rifkind in her lustrous biography of Salka Viertel, the shamefully unsung stage actress-turned-screenwriter whose own gift to America was to make the transitions and lives of German-speaking expatriates to the States infinitely better and more productive.

Some of them were Jews fleeing Hitler. Others, like the Mann brothers, were ideological refugees. What unified them in exile was more Weltschmerz than religion or politics. Their Weimar-on-the-Pacific, where they congregated on Sundays to celebrate their collective escape, mourn their loss of homeland and identity, and enjoy — in German and English — the pleasure of each others’ company (not to mention the strudel and chocolate torte), was 165 North Mabery in Santa Monica. Their hostess was Viertel, subject of Rifkind’s vibrant portrait, “The Sun and Her Stars.” Belatedly and beautifully, Rifkind restores this singular figure to her rightful stature.

Oft-cited in the margins of Hollywood memoirs by Charlie Chaplin and S. N. Behrman and in the footnotes of Garbo and Mann biographies, Viertel (1889—1978) was a combination screenwriter, studio whisperer, benefactress, connector, life coach and lay rabbi.

While her day job was writing for Garbo (most famously, “Queen Christina”), by 1938 her all-day-and-night job was ministering to the exile community, helping members find housing and jobs and negotiate the mazes of U. S. immigration and Los Angeles transit. For 30 years in Hollywood Viertel gave more than she could afford of her time and money, much of the latter generously donated to the European Film Fund. In her later, leaner, years the EFF would support her.

She was born Salomea Steuermann to prosperous (if not observant) Jews in Galicia (present-day Ukraine) when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. She distinguished herself on stage in Germany and Austria before and during World War I when she witnessed the Russian siege that laid waste to the family’s estate in Sambor, a garrison town where her father was mayor. In 1918, at the age of 29, she wed Austrian poet and theater director Berthold Viertel, heroically maintaining a stage career and commuter marriage while also giving birth to three sons. Between cities, sons, and gigs, she also knocked out a screen treatment for Hungarian producer Gabriel Pascal. It was never produced, but the money helped.

“They were citified bohemians with many addresses and no home,” describes Rifkind, when Murnau, who had just directed the landmark film Sunrise (1927), offered Berthold a job in Hollywood as his scriptwriter. Given hyperinflation and economic uncertainty in Germany, they took a chance on America, parking their sons in Dresden with a nanny. Before boarding the train in New York for Los Angeles, they ran into Max Reinhardt, the theater giant then directing a play on Broadway. was directing on One in his retinue correctly predicted that Salka, then 39, would not find much work as an actress in Hollywood, where her stage presence and talent would be trumped by the more highly valued Hollywood assets of youth and beauty.

She learned English (her eighth language) and how to drive. Before long, she brought her sons to California, setting up household in a Tudor-style cottage on Mabery near the ocean in Santa Monica. It was there that she nested, art-directing her stage where she enjoyed her longest-running role as a salonniere, hosting guests on Sunday afternoons, introducing European intelligentsia to Hollywood power — and vice-versa.

Although Salka sporadically appeared in films directed by Berthold, she channeled the greater part of her creative energies into what Rifkind calls “pro bono human resources work,” helping Murnau prepare his Tahitian film Tabu and Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein raise funds for his abortive Mexican effort, Que Viva Mexico! Then a decisive encounter at the home of émigré German director Ernst Lubitsch changed the direction of her professional career. At Lubitsch’s home she met Greta Garbo whose acting she had long admired. (If the opposite was true as well, that Garbo may have seen Salka onstage when the former was in Berlin during the mid-1920s, Rifkind does not say.) Almost immediately they became friends, colleagues, and some say, intimates. As to whether or not they were lovers, there is ample gossip but no smoking lipstick or other positive evidence, says Rifkind, who gives a literary shrug at this facet of the Greta/Salka relationship. Rifkind correctly sees her job as chronicling her subject, not the details of her amours. Salka enjoyed a handful of extramarital affairs, as did her husband.

Garbo soon persuaded MGM to hire Salka for the role of Marthy in the German-language version of Anna Christie. The Swede was not the only one who recognized that Salka’s creative talents were underutilized. As the Swedish actress negotiated a new contract giving her the choice of directors and scripts, she challenged the older actress to come up with dramatic ideas. Salka had recently enjoyed a biography of Christina, Sweden’s 17th-century monarch. MGM’s greatest star as the Swedish queen was an idea that appealed to Irving Thalberg, the studio’s chief of production. He liked Salka’s treatment but thought it needed more work. So commenced Salka’s decade as Garbo’s favorite screenwriter. “Queen Christina” (1933) ranks with “Camille” (1936) and “Ninotchka” (1939) as one of Garbo’s three greatest sound films.

Salka used her stage skills to act out possible plot turns in story meetings. “One of Thalberg’s favored Scheherazades” is how Rifkind describes her. The newly-minted screenwriter worked on many other scripts for the so-called “Swedish Sphinx,” including “The Painted Veil” (1934), “Anna Karenina” (1935) and “Conquest” (1937), and the original screenplay for “Madame Curie” that Garbo turned down and was reworked for Greer Garson.

Viertel’s employment at MGM supported both her family and, by 1936, her unofficial ambassadorship to Hollywood’s mushrooming immigrant community. (Rifkind cites California historian Kevin Starr, who estimates that 10,000 from Germany and Austria left their homelands for Los Angeles between 1933 and 1941, “the most complete migration of artists and intellectuals in European history.”) Salka was the advocate of choice for immigrant artists, whether they were French actor Charles Boyer or composer Franz Waxman.

Shortly after he arrived in Hollywood Waxman (you know his scores from A Place in the Sun and Sunset Boulevard) met director James Whale in Salka’s living room and composed the first of over his 100 Hollywood soundtracks for Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). He paid Salka’s generosity forward by writing affidavits for Jews desperate to leave Europe, including a family of Viennese Waxmans who were no relation but who saw his name on movie credits and wrote him for help. Another composer she helped was Arnold Schoenberg. Years later, his who had influenced Salka’s brother, and whose lawyer grandson, Randol, fought work to restore art owned by Jewish collectors and were looted by the Nazis, like Klimt’s Woman in Gold. Conservatively there were hundreds more, maybe thousands. For these stateless figures between worlds, Rifkind describes Salka’s hospitality as ‘rehumanizing.”

When Thalberg asked Salka to intercede with Schoenberg and persuade the composer to write the score to The Good Earth (1936), she tried, making for the funniest vignette in the book. Well known to film scholars and classical music lovers, the Thalberg/Schoenberg impasse is one of the great when-worlds-collide moments in pop cultural and modernist history. Thalberg wanted to hire the composer to write a score inspired by Chinese folk songs. Schoenberg wanted $50,000 to be in total control of the music and the keys in which the actors recited their dialogue. As Rifkind writes, “Salka was a diplomat with a firm grasp of both milieus,” and issued honest warnings about the mogul’s and composer’s expectations. While the negotiations failed, Salka succeeded in “softening the boundaries between high culture and commerce in Hollywood for the benefit of each.”

Though well aware of Salka’s salons and screenplays, I had neither knowledge of the depth and breadth of her beneficence, nor the impact of her mitzvahs. And since I hadn’t read her self-effacing memoir, “The Kindness of Strangers” — I have now, and she claims very little credit for her achievement — I had no idea of how radically her life and resources ebbed after World War II.

Because her generosity extended to those sympathetic to socialist and Communist causes, after the second world war her passport was seized and she was deemed “a premature anti-Fascist,” not blacklisted but “greylisted” For awhile she was able to keep the Santa Monica salon because Charlie Chaplin gave her funds, but ultimately had to sell. In 1953 she was unable to travel to Europe and see (by then, her ex-husband) Berthold before he died. By the mid-1950s the woman who had helped so many others get jobs was herself mostly unemployed. She wrote the narration for Jean Renoir’s “The River” (1951), but was denied screen credit. She worked as one of the seven screenwriters on a piece of glamorous dreck for Hedy Lamarr called “Three Queens” (1954).

For a time she lived in New York with her beloved granddaughter, Christina, and daughter-in-law, Virginia, then wed to her screenwriter son, Peter, who left his wife for actress Deborah Kerr. Soon Virginia died from complications of a cigarette-related fire. Salka then moved to Klosters, Switzerland to be near Christina and Peter, who helped support his mother as she wrote her memoirs, published in 1969. She died in 1978.

While reading Rifkind’s extraordinary book, I thought of conducting an Oskar Schindler-type census of all the lives that in one way or other, Salka emotionally and financially rescued. Add to that sum the number of the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren that resulted from her rescues. The Talmud says that he who saves one life saves the world entire. Surely the Viertel Jews constitute their own constellation. What a life-force Salka was. What an infinitely giving heart. What a great movie character this onetime screenwriter would make.

Screenwriter for Garbo, savior for exiles fleeing Hitler. By Carrie Rickey. Forward, February 5, 2020. 

                  A group of German exiles stroll through Pacific Palisades in 1937. From left to right: composer Otto Klemperer, anti-Nazi activist Prince Hubertus von Löwenstein, composer Arnold Schoenberg, and composer Ernst Toch.

You can visit all the addresses in the course of a long day. Bertolt Brecht lived in a two-story clapboard house on Twenty-sixth Street, in Santa Monica. The novelist Heinrich Mann resided a few blocks away, on Montana Avenue. The screenwriter Salka Viertel held gatherings on Mabery Road, near the Santa Monica beach. Alfred Döblin, the author of “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” had a place on Citrus Avenue, in Hollywood. His colleague Lion Feuchtwanger occupied the Villa Aurora, a Spanish-style mansion overlooking the Pacific; among its amusements was a Hitler dartboard. Vicki Baum, whose novel “Grand Hotel” brought her a screenwriting career, had a house on Amalfi Drive, near the leftist composer Hanns Eisler. Alma Mahler-Werfel, the widow of Gustav Mahler, lived with her third husband, the best-selling Austrian writer Franz Werfel, on North Bedford Drive, next door to the conductor Bruno Walter. Elisabeth Hauptmann, the co-author of “The Threepenny Opera,” lived in Mandeville Canyon, at the actor Peter Lorre’s ranch. The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno rented a duplex apartment on Kenter Avenue, meeting with Max Horkheimer, who lived nearby, to write the post-Marxist jeremiad “Dialectic of Enlightenment.” At a suitably lofty remove, on San Remo Drive, was Thomas Mann, Heinrich’s brother, the august author of “The Magic Mountain.”

In the nineteen-forties, the West Side of Los Angeles effectively became the capital of German literature in exile. It was as if the cafés of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna had disgorged their clientele onto Sunset Boulevard. The writers were at the core of a European émigré community that also included the film directors Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Otto Preminger, Jean Renoir, Robert Siodmak, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder, and William Wyler; the theatre directors Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner; the actors Marlene Dietrich and Hedy Lamarr; the architects Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra; and the composers Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Seldom in human history has one city hosted such a staggering convocation of talent.

The standard myth of this great emigration pits the elevated mentality of Central Europe against the supposed “wasteland” or “cultural desert” of Southern California. Indeed, a number of exiles fell to scowling under the palms. Brecht wrote, “The town of Hollywood has taught me this / Paradise and hell / can be one city.” The composer Eric Zeisl called California a “sunny blue grave.” Adorno could have had Muscle Beach in mind when he identified a social condition called the Health unto Death: “The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy.”

Anecdotes of dyspeptic aloofness belie the richness and the complexity of the émigrés’ cultural role. As Ehrhard Bahr argues in his 2007 book, “Weimar on the Pacific,” many exiles were able to form bonds with progressive elements in mid-century L.A. Even before the refugees from Nazi Germany arrived, Schindler and Neutra had launched a wave of modernist residential architecture. When Schoenberg taught at U.S.C. and U.C.L.A., he guided such native-born radical spirits as John Cage and Lou Harrison. Surprising alliances sprang up among the newcomers and adventurous members of the Hollywood set. Charlie Chaplin and George Gershwin played tennis with Schoenberg. Charles Laughton took the lead in a 1947 production of Brecht’s “Galileo.”

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?

Two of Germany’s leading novelists had the good fortune to be away on lecture tours as the Nazis were taking over. On February 11, 1933, two weeks after Hitler became Chancellor, Thomas Mann travelled to Amsterdam to deliver a talk titled “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner.” A onetime conservative who had embraced liberal-democratic values in the early nineteen-twenties, Mann was attempting to wrest his favorite composer from Nazi appropriation. He did not set foot in Germany again until 1949. In the same period, Feuchtwanger, a German-Jewish writer of strong leftist convictions, was touring the U.S., speaking on such topics as “Revival of Barbarism in Modern Times.” He died in L.A., in 1958.

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. Feuchtwanger and others settled in Sanary-sur-Mer, on the Riviera, where the Mediterranean climate offered a dry run for the Southern California experience. The onset of the Second World War, in 1939, instantly destroyed this temporary paradise. The fact that the émigrés were victims of repression did not save them from being thrown into French internment camps. Feuchtwanger captured the surreal misery of the experience in his nonfiction narrative “The Devil in France,” which has been reissued under the aegis of the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, at U.S.C. The devil in question was the same shrugging heartlessness that later enabled the deportation of nearly seventy-five thousand French Jews to Nazi death camps.

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.

High-placed friends conspired to keep these celebrity refugees safe. Eleanor Roosevelt, an avid reader of Feuchtwanger’s books, became alarmed when she saw a photograph of the author in a French camp. A New York-based organization called the Emergency Rescue Committee dispatched the journalist Varian Fry to France to facilitate the extraction of writers and other artists, often by extralegal means. Such measures were required because American immigration laws limited European nationals to strict quotas. If the quotas had been relaxed, many more thousands of Jews could have escaped. Fry, the first American to be honored at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, ignored his narrow remit and worked heroically to help as many people as possible, including those without name recognition.

                                                            Anna Seghers, Paris, circa 1940

Anna Seghers, a German-Jewish Communist who spent the war in Mexico City, painted a brutal picture of the crisis in her novel “Transit” (1944), which New York Review Books republished in 2013, in a translation by Margot Bettauer Dembo. Refugees in France must negotiate a bureaucratic maze of entrance visas, exit visas, transit visas, and American affidavits. The main character’s plan for escape relies on his having been mistaken for a noted writer (one who is actually dead, by suicide). Another’s path to freedom depends on transporting two dogs that belong to a couple from Boston. All around Marseille are “the remnants of crushed armies, escaped slaves, human hordes who had been chased from all the countries of the earth, and having at last reached the sea, boarded ships in order to discover new lands from which they would again be driven; forever running from one death to another.”

By 1941, the full company of exiles had arrived in Los Angeles, blinking in the sun. Their daily routines were often absurd. Several writers, including Heinrich Mann and Döblin, were granted one-year contracts at Warner Bros. and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. These offers had little to do with active interest in their talent; rather, the motivation was to help them obtain visas. Required to play their part in this benevolent charade, Mann and Döblin reported for work each day, even though their English was poor and their ideas had no hope of being produced. Once the contracts ran out, the two struggled financially. Döblin wrote, “On the West Coast there are only two categories of writers: those who sit in clover and those who sit in dirt.”

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.

The real explanation for the German literary migration to L.A., though, has to do with the steady growth of a network of friendly connections, and at its center was Salka Viertel. Donna Rifkind pays tribute to this irresistibly dynamic figure in “The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood” (Other Press), and New York Review Books recently reissued Viertel’s addictive memoir, “The Kindness of Strangers.” Viertel worked tirelessly to obtain visas for endangered artists, and to help them find their footing when they arrived. Weimar on the Pacific might never have existed without her.

Viertel had been in L.A. since 1928, when her husband, the director Berthold Viertel, received a studio contract. Ernst Lubitsch, F. W. Murnau, and Erich von Stroheim had already given Hollywood a German accent. Salka had been an actor on the German stage; she now turned to screenwriting, collaborating frequently with Garbo, one of her closest friends. Bohemians rotated through her house. (Christopher Isherwood lived for a while in an apartment over the garage.) She regularly threw parties, curating conversations among a dazzling assortment of guests—everyone from Schoenberg to Ava Gardner—and then repairing to the kitchen to prepare her much lauded Sacher Torte. Rifkind reports that Thomas Mann once showed up at the wedding of strangers because he had heard that Viertel’s torte would be served.

Rifkind persuasively argues that Viertel was far more than a bon vivant: she had a genius for fostering creative relationships. 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.” For Rifkind, the anecdote demonstrates that Viertel was not a mere observer in this social world but its master of ceremonies: “She was the mutual contact who first made it possible for the composer and the producer to meet. She was the diplomat with a firm grasp of the complexities of both milieus.” Even if Schoenberg wrote nothing for Hollywood, his influence on film scoring was immense.

The émigré community certainly needed Viertel’s diplomacy. The struggling authors resented the popular ones. Misunderstandings arose between political refugees—those who had been aligned with the left or had strongly protested Nazism—and Jewish refugees, whose political sympathies ranged widely. The Austrians tended to band together; the musicians spoke their own language. The two opposing poles were Brecht and Thomas Mann, who had long disliked each other. Brecht saw Mann as a grandiose narcissist with no empathy for lesser spirits. Mann recoiled from Brecht’s combativeness, although when he read “Mother Courage and Her Children” he was forced to admit that “the beast has talent.”

                                                   
                                                 Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger.   

Feuchtwanger, Werfel, Döblin, and Thomas and Heinrich Mann were all mainstays at the Viertel salons. On one occasion, they and dozens of others gathered to celebrate Heinrich’s seventieth birthday. The brothers rose in turn, each pulling a sheaf of papers from his coat pocket and reading an exhaustive appreciation of the other’s work. Afterward, Viertel told the writer Bruno Frank how much the spectacle had moved her. Frank responded, “They write and read such ceremonial evaluations of each other every ten years.”

The array of personalities was formidable and eccentric. The Manns, scions of an old North German merchant family, were bourgeois to the core. Thomas had “the reserved politeness of a diplomat on official duty,” Viertel wrote; Heinrich, the “manners of a nineteenth-century grand seigneur.” Feuchtwanger was tan and fit, though he liked nothing more than to withdraw into his vast library and burrow into rare books. Döblin, of Pomeranian-Jewish background, had a cutting wit, which was often directed at Thomas Mann. Werfel, the son of German-speaking Jews in Prague, was the most politically conservative of the group, prone to outbursts against the Bolsheviks. Nonetheless, he was well liked—a mystic in a crowd of skeptics.

All five novelists had been alert to political danger in their work of the nineteen-twenties and early thirties. Feuchtwanger’s breakthrough novel, “Jew Süss,” contains harrowing evocations of anti-Jewish violence in eighteenth-century Germany; his “Success,” set in Munich in the early twenties, caricatures Hitler as a pompous thug. In Döblin’s “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” the ex-convict Franz Biberkopf supports himself, in part, by selling the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. Thomas Mann’s novella “Mario and the Magician” is a parable of Fascist manipulation. Heinrich Mann had been more farsighted than any of them, as Thomas acknowledged in his birthday speech at Viertel’s. Heinrich’s “Der Untertan,” or “The Underling,” written before the First World War but not published until 1918, is the definitive portrait of German nationalism curdling into chauvinism and anti-Semitism.

The most haunting of these pre-Nazi novels is Werfel’s “The Forty Days of Musa Dagh” (1933), which was not translated fully into English until 2012. The book honors the valiant resistance of an Armenian community during the genocide of the First World War and after. Werfel accomplishes a feat of large-scale narrative control, replete with hair-raising battle scenes. He also delivers the first great fictional reckoning with the psychology of genocide. At one point, the German protestant missionary Johannes Lepsius, based on a real-life figure, encounters Enver Pasha, one of the chief agents of the genocide: “What Herr Lepsius perceived was that arctic mask of the human being who ‘has overcome all sentimentality’—the mask of a human mind which has got beyond guilt and all its qualms.”

After 1933, the exiles had to come to grips with a world that surpassed their most extravagant nightmares. One popular stratagem was to insert contemporary allegories into historical fiction, which was enjoying an extended vogue. Heinrich Mann produced a hefty pair of novels dramatizing the life of King Henry IV of France. A gruesome description of the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre makes one think of pogroms in Nazi Germany, and the leaders of the Catholic League radiate Fascist ruthlessness. Döblin, by contrast, immersed himself in recent history, undertaking a novel cycle titled “November 1918.” It examines the German Revolution of 1918-19, with the Communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht featured as principal characters. Döblin seems almost to be reliving the Revolution and its aftermath, in the hope that it will have a better outcome.

A handful of émigré novels have emigration itself as their subject. Seghers’s “Transit” is the classic example of the genre, but others are worth revisiting. Feuchtwanger’s “Exil,” translated into English as “Paris Gazette,” is a soulful satire, set among disputatious emigrants in Paris. Sepp Trautwein, the protagonist, is a high-minded German composer who transforms himself into a belligerent anti-Nazi newspaper columnist. His finest hour comes when he invents an absurd speech by Hitler on the subject of Wagner. Exile is a humiliation, Feuchtwanger writes, but it makes you “quicker, more ingenious, subtler, harder.”

A more desperate vision emerges in the work of Klaus Mann, Thomas’s oldest son, who labored all his life in his father’s cold shadow. “The Volcano,” published in German in 1939, three years after he arrived in the United States, registers the toll that exile exacted on the young. In scenes anticipating Klaus’s own fate—he died of a drug overdose in 1949, at forty-two—characters spiral into suicidal despair or chemical oblivion. Hollywood provides no respite: “All was false here—the palms, the sunsets, the fruit, nothing had reality, everything was swindle, mere scenery.” The novel’s depiction of gay desire presumably explains why an English translation never appeared. At the end of the narrative, a mystically inclined Brazilian boy converses with an angel, who kisses him on the lips, takes him on a flight around the world, and brings the consoling news that tolerance reigns in Heaven.

Werfel, having prophesied Nazi terror in “Musa Dagh,” shied away from a head-on confrontation with it. At the start of his final novel, a bizarre and fascinating experiment called “Star of the Unborn” (1946), Werfel confesses his inability to address the “monstrous reality” of the day. In a sly way, the novel speaks to that reality all the same. The narrator, F.W., is transported to a peaceful utopia in the distant future, which collapses into chaos. The tone is mainly playful, even zany, but a chill descends when F.W. visits a facility known as Wintergarden, in which those who have tired of life undergo a “retrovolution” into infancy and then death. The process sometimes goes awry, producing ghastly mutations. It is a conjuring of the Holocaust written just as reports of the German death camps were appearing.

                                                   Thomas Mann and family in Pacific Palisades, 1940s

Thomas Mann, the uncrowned emperor of Germany in exile, lived in a spacious, white-walled aerie in Pacific Palisades, which the émigré architect J. R. Davidson had designed to his specifications. He saw “Bambi” at the Fox Theatre in Westwood; he ate Chinese food; he listened to Jack Benny on the radio; he furtively admired handsome men in uniform; he puzzled over the phenomenon of the “Baryton-Boy Frankie Sinatra,” to quote his diaries. Like almost all the émigrés, he never attempted to write fiction about America. He was completing his own historical epic, the tetralogy “Joseph and His Brothers,” which is vastly more entertaining than its enormous length might suggest. The Biblical Joseph is reinvented as a wily, seductive youth who escapes spectacularly from predicaments of his own making, and eventually emerges, in the service of the Pharaoh, as a masterly bureaucrat of social reform. It’s as if Tadzio from “Death in Venice” grew up to become Henry Wallace.

Mann’s comfortable existence depended on a canny marketing plan devised by his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. The scholar Tobias Boes, in his recent book, “Thomas Mann’s War” (Cornell), describes how Knopf remade a difficult, quizzical author as the “Greatest Living Man of Letters,” an animate statue of European humanism. The supreme ironist became the high dean of the Book-of-the-Month Club. The florid and error-strewn translations of Helen Lowe-Porter added to this ponderous impression. (John E. Woods’s translations of the major novels, published between 1993 and 2005, are far superior.) Yet Knopf’s positioning enabled Mann to assume a new public role: that of spokesperson for the anti-Nazi cause. Boes writes, “Because he so manifestly stood above the partisan fray, Mann was able to speak out against Hitler and be perceived as a voice of reason rather than be dismissed as an agitator.”

Essays like “The Coming Victory of Democracy” and “War and Democracy” remain dismayingly relevant in the era of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Donald Trump. In 1938, Mann stated, “Even America feels today that democracy is not an assured possession, that it has enemies, that it is threatened from within and from without, that it has once more become a problem.” At such moments, he said, the division between the political and the nonpolitical disappears. Politics is “no longer a game, played according to certain, generally acknowledged rules. . . . It’s a matter of ultimate values.” Mann also challenged the xenophobia of America’s strict immigration laws: “It is not human, not democratic, and it means to show a moral Achilles’ heel to the fascist enemies of mankind if one clings with bureaucratic coldness to these laws.”

On the subject of German war guilt, Mann incited a controversy that persisted for decades. He was acutely aware that mass murder was taking place in Nazi-occupied lands—a genocide that went far beyond what Werfel had described in “Musa Dagh.” As early as January, 1942, in a radio address to Germans throughout Europe, Mann disclosed that four hundred Dutch Jews had been killed by poison gas—a “true Siegfried weapon,” he added, in a sardonic reference to the fearless hero of Germanic legend. In a 1945 speech titled “The Camps,” he said, “Every German—everyone who speaks German, writes German, has lived as a German—is affected by this shameful exposure. It is not a small clique of criminals who are involved.”

The overwhelming fact of the Holocaust led Mann to call for a searching self-examination on the part of German people all over the world. In “Germany and the Germans,” a remarkable speech delivered at the Library of Congress in 1945, he argued that the demonic energies of Hitler’s regime had roots reaching back to Martin Luther. Mann did not exclude himself from the web of shame: “It is all within me. I have been through it all.” In the end, he said, “there are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning.” The entire story is a “paradigm of the tragedy of human life.” That message of universal responsibility—which, Mann made clear, is not the same as universal guilt—aroused fierce opposition in postwar Germany, where searching self-examination was not in fashion. Allied forces, for their part, were happy to skate over the de-Nazification process, so that Western Europe could focus on fighting a new enemy, the Soviets.

Mann’s words also caused a flap among the émigrés. Brecht and Döblin both criticized their colleague for condemning ordinary Germans alongside Nazi élites. Brecht went so far as to write a poem titled “When the Nobel Prize Winner Thomas Mann Granted the Americans and English the Right to Chastise the German People for Ten Long Years for the Crimes of the Hitler Regime.” In fact, Mann disapproved of punitive measures, but his nuances were overlooked. As Hans Rudolf Vaget has shown, in his comprehensive 2011 study, “Thomas Mann, der Amerikaner,” the fallout from “Germany and the Germans” clouded Mann’s reputation for a generation. Only after several decades did the wisdom of his approach become clear, as Germany established a model for how a nation can work through its past—a process that is ongoing.

Mann’s cross-examination of the German soul had a fictional component. In 1947, he published the novel “Doctor Faustus,” in which a modernist German composer makes a pact with the Devil—or, at least, hallucinates himself doing so. In great part, it is a retelling of the life of Friedrich Nietzsche, of his plunge from rarefied intellectual heights into megalomania and madness. It is also Mann’s most sustained exploration of the realm of music, which, to him, had always seemed seductive and dangerous in equal measure. The shadow of Wagner hangs over the book, even if Adrian Leverkühn, the character at its center, is anti-Wagnerian in orientation, his works mixing atonality, neoclassicism, ironic neo-Romanticism, and the unfulfilled compositional fantasies of Adorno, who assisted Mann in writing the musical descriptions.

The narrator of “Doctor Faustus” is a humanist scholar named Serenus Zeitblom. With a high-bourgeois mien and a digressive prose style, Zeitblom is unmistakably an exercise in authorial self-parody, and he begins writing his memoir of Leverkühn in May, 1943, on the same day that Mann himself set to work on the novel. But Zeitblom is not in Los Angeles. Rather, he belongs to the so-called inner emigration—the cohort of German intellectuals who professed to oppose Nazism from within the country. Mann rejected the concept of inner emigration when it surfaced after the war, and Zeitblom, with his ineffectual reservations about the regime, stands in for such compromised figures as the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann and the poet Gottfried Benn.

The novel caused its own commotion within the émigré community. Leverkühn is presented as the originator of the twelve-tone method of composition—a historical distortion that infuriated Schoenberg. Mann was forced to add a prefatory note in which he gave Schoenberg credit. (The tale is laid out in “The Doctor Faustus Dossier,” edited by Randol Schoenberg, the composer’s grandson.) Furthermore, the novel’s allegorical structure appears to equate the diabolical complexities of modern music with the death fugue of German politics. Schoenberg, who had perceived the genocidal potential of Nazi anti-Semitism far earlier than Mann had, understandably resented the implication. Yet Leverkühn is in no way a stand-in for Hitler: he is strangely righteous in his cold-minded quest for extreme sounds and apocalyptic visions. Mann comments in his diaries that the composer is a “hero of our times . . . my ideal.”

If a simple message can be extracted from the pitch-black labyrinth of “Doctor Faustus,” it is that art cannot escape its context, no matter how much it strives toward higher spheres. Ultimately, the book is another Mannian ritual of self-interrogation. Marta Feuchtwanger once said of the novelist, “He felt in a way responsible as a German. . . . He defended the First World War and also the emperor. Later on, it seems that he recognized his error; maybe that was the reason that he was so terribly upset about the whole thing, more than anybody else.” There is, she commented, “no greater hate than a lost love.”

Few obvious traces of the emigration persist in contemporary Los Angeles. A city that is flexing its power as an international arts capital ought to do more to honor this golden age of the not too distant past. But the evidence is there if you search for it. You can still hear stories about the principals from the composer Walter Arlen, aged ninety-nine, and the sublime actor and raconteur Norman Lloyd, aged a hundred and five. A modest tourist business has built up around the legacy of the émigré architects. The homes of Thomas Mann and Feuchtwanger are now under the purview of the German government, which offers residencies there to scholars and artists. The programmers at the Mann house, which has undergone a meticulous renovation, are soliciting video essays on the future of democracy—a topic as fraught today as it was when the author took it up in the nineteen-thirties.

The improbable idyll of Weimar on the Pacific dissipated quickly. Werfel and Bruno Frank both died in 1945. Nelly Mann, Heinrich’s wife, died the previous year, by suicide; Heinrich died in 1950. Döblin went to Germany to assist in the de-Nazification effort, meeting with considerable frustration. Those exiles who remained in America felt mounting insecurity as the Cold War took hold. McCarthyism made no exceptions for leftist writers who had been persecuted by the Nazis. Brecht left in 1947, the day after he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and later settled in East Germany. Feuchtwanger longed to return to Europe but, having never been granted U.S. citizenship, chose not to risk leaving.

Thomas Mann, who had become an American citizen in 1944, felt the dread of déjà vu. The likes of McCarthy, Hoover, and Nixon had crossed his line of sight before. In 1947, after the blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten, he recorded a broadcast in which he warned of incipient Fascist tendencies: “Spiritual intolerance, political inquisition, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’: that is how it started in Germany.” Two years later, he found his face featured in a Life magazine spread titled “Dupes and Fellow Travelers.” In his diary, he commented that it looked like a Steckbrief: a “Wanted” poster.

To stand in Mann’s study today, with editions of Goethe and Schiller on the shelves, is to feel pride in the country that took him in and shame for the country that drove him out—not two Americas but one. In this room, the erstwhile “Greatest Living Man of Letters” fell prey to the clammy fear of the hunted. Was the year 1933 about to repeat itself? Would he be detained, interrogated, even imprisoned? In 1952, Mann took a final walk through his house and made his exit. He died in Zurich, in 1955—no longer an émigré German but an American in exile.

The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile. By Alex Ross. The New Yorker , March 9, 2020.

Émigré postscript. By Alex Ross.  Pursuant to this recent New Yorker essay about German-speaking novelists in Los Angeles, Alex Ross has gathered some bibliographic notes and suggestions for further reading.  The Rest Is Noise, March 9 , 2020

                                      Salka Viertel in the  film “Anna Christie.” MGM, 1931. 

The Galician-born actress turned American screenwriter Salka Viertel was never famous, but she always made things possible for her friends who were. Still, her name usually hovers in the realm of the footnote or fleeting aside, bobbing up in Thomas Mann’s diaries, Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography, Bertolt Brecht’s journals and in a Grand Hotel-scaled heap of books about Greta Garbo.

The role she played in both Golden Age Hollywood and transplanted Weimar high culture was crucial if vaporous. As a remarkable crew of European artists and intellectuals fled Nazism and streamed toward Southern California in the 1930s, Viertel worked in dozens of behind-the-scenes ways to help these desperate, gifted people — first scrambling to arrange visas and raise money on their behalf; later offering introductions, companionship, housing, wedges of superior chocolate cake and much more. Her Sunday afternoon Santa Monica gatherings became the stuff of local legend, with Viertel supplying what one observer called the “social glue” that bound the émigrés into a community. Or, as another of her intimates put it: “The history of Hollywood … is incomplete without an appreciation of Salka Viertel’s distinct talent for human relationships.”

Viertel is, in short, a terrific subject for a biography, and the veteran book reviewer Donna Rifkind has done well to focus her first full-length effort on this fascinating if little-known personality. Rifkind sees the worldly yet unassuming Viertel as at once an extraordinary character and a telling representative of something larger than herself. She’s right to.

Though most of “The Sun and Her Stars” unfolds in the United States of an earlier, anxious era — when hostility toward “others” of every sort reached a shrill crescendo — Rifkind clearly means to hold a mirror to our stranger-suspecting moment as well. She’s eager to emphasize just how much Hollywood and America in general owe to immigrants, many refugees among them. This fact has been articulated countless times before, but the dark underscoring that Rifkind provides feels unfortunately necessary these days.

A labor of love and careful research, the book gets off to a shaky start. Rifkind’s prose can be clumsy, and it’s especially ungainly at the outset: “In the end, none of this has been deemed thus far to be worthy of our attention”; “Murnau’s pictorial language pulses throughout American film history, engraved on the work of Alfred Hitchcock and Werner Herzog and continuing more recently in the work of Terrence Malick and Barry Jenkins.” Extended passages rely far too heavily on paraphrase of Viertel’s marvelous 1969 memoir, “The Kindness of Strangers.” Rifkind repeatedly renders flat approximations of Viertel’s own elegant sentences and leans far too often on that canny, first-person account for progression of thought, action and image. The problem may be one of overidentification. In these early sections, Rifkind seems to lack the necessary critical distance and appears content to trot dutifully behind her perspicacious heroine, repeating after her.

Something startling and powerful happens, though, midway through the book. As the historical situation Rifkind describes grows increasingly dire, she snaps to: Her writing sharpens and her gaze widens to take in a boggling Who’s Who of uprooted 20th-century eminences.

Everyone from the Mann brothers (Thomas and Heinrich) to Theodor Adorno, Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Laughton, Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley surfaces in Viertel’s living room. As they do, Rifkind draws skillfully from multiple sources, expanding her sympathies to include them all — wives and lovers, too — in her melancholy narrative. That generosity of spirit and attention to detail suit a book about this “mother of exiles,” who was always welcoming outsiders in.

The Sun and her Stars : Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood

By Donna Rifkind. Illustrated. 550 pp. Other Press. $30.

The unknown hostess of 1930s Hollywood. By Adina Hoffman. The New York Times, January 28, 2020.

                                         Salka Viertel and Sergej M. Eisenstein, Santa Monica Beach.

Salka Viertel (1889-1978) was an actress, screenwriter, influential hostess and effective humanitarian. She was born on the estate of her wealthy Jewish family in Sambor, western Ukraine, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father, a prominent lawyer, was mayor of the town, one brother was a concert pianist, another was a professional soccer player. She was neither a beauty nor a star, but acted in everything from Greek drama to Schiller and Strindberg in the major cities of central Europe. Her stage career ended when she and her husband Berthold Viertel moved to America in 1928.

Salka arrived the year after The Jazz Singer introduced sound movies. The new sound ruined the careers of actors with strong European accents (or squeaky voices) but also increased the demand for talented screenwriters. Before the Production Code of 1934 there was no censorship, which allowed Hedy Lamarr’s sensational nude swimming scene in Ecstasy (1933). Salka thought acting in movies that were shot out of sequence was more difficult than appearing on stage and said, “acting in fragments is like drinking from an eyedropper when you are parched”. Christopher Isherwood noted Salka’s energy, humour, charisma, intense emotions, gift for friendship and reckless generosity. Aldous Huxley’s wife remarked, “she loves perfume and takes lovers,” which made her seem like a weak imitation of the femme fatale, Alma Mahler. In her new biography, The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Donna Rifkind doesn’t note that Alma made anti-Semitic remarks despite (or because of) her two Jewish husbands, Gustav Mahler and Franz Werfel.

Rifkind describes Salka’s husband Berthold, a stage and film director, as “a lover of excess—too many cigarettes; too many rich desserts; an extravagant temper; a chronic sexual thrall to actresses”. Emphasising Berthold’s leonine head and grim mouth, Isherwood portrayed him as Friedrich Bergmann in his novel Prater Violet (1945). Unlike Garbo and Heinrich Mann, who briefly flirted with the bogus Swami Prabhavananda, Berthold said Isherwood was wasting his time with that “old Indian stuff”. Berthold sardonically wrote that “marriage is sex without desire,” and his protestations of eternal love when Salka was supporting him in New York sound hollow and unconvincing. He had many lovers, including the English actress and writer Beatrix Lehmann and the Austrian actress Elisabeth Neumann, whom he married in 1947. Salka never remarried.

                                                           Salka Viertel, with Gottfried Reinhardt (r). 

 During her marriage Salka gave in to her impulses and need to retaliate. She loved extravagantly and heedlessly, defiantly asserting her right to have sex with both women and men and to ignore the emotional damage she caused. She explained her love life by telling Isherwood, “if a man wants a woman enough, he can have her. Absolutely. It’s only a question of time and place.” Her first serious, two-year affair was with her screenwriter-neighbour Oliver Garrett. An open liaison, it was tolerated, if not endorsed, by their spouses, who ignored the brutti momenti and social constraints. Her next lover, in 1933, was the German director Gottfried Reinhardt, 22 years younger than the 44-year-old Salka. Throughout the next decade they were emotionally, physically and even professionally involved when he became her producer at MGM. Rifkind calls this a “civilised arrangement,” yet buried grievances, boiling tensions and deepening wounds caused bitter quarrels. Rifkind naively accepts Salka’s exculpatory claims that her three “sons were undamaged by their parents’ complex relationship” and soon “adjusted to the domestic changes, as children do, disregarding the opera buffa bed-switching.” But children who’ve experienced their mother’s adultery are often torn between loyalty to the older father and younger lover, and can be deeply wounded by the moral transgressions and emotional scars.

Nevertheless, Salka’s three sons managed to have successful lives. Hans became a linguistics scholar at MIT. Thomas worked at the Los Angeles Department for Social Services. Peter (who was my friend and introduced me to the bullfighters who knew Hemingway) graduated from Dartmouth in 1941. He served as a marine in the Allied landings in the Solomon Islands, won a Silver Star, and, as a spymaster with the OSS, parachuted anti-Nazis into wartime Germany. The beautiful Jigee Schulberg left her husband for Peter, who married her in 1943. Both had affairs, and Peter’s lovers included Joan Fontaine and Ava Gardner. Jigee became an alcoholic and drug addict and, in a ghastly accident, burned herself to death. Peter — who’d brought out a novel, The Canyon, when he was nineteen — wrote the screenplays of The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea, became a great friend of John Huston and Hemingway, and published a brilliant memoir, Dangerous Friends (1992), about them. He finally had a long and happy marriage to the elegant Scottish actress, Deborah Kerr.

Adam and Eve were the first mythical exiles in our culture. In the 1930s and early 1940s real Jewish exiles were desperately trying to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe. The foreign intellects and original ideas of the refugees who reached America had a powerful effect on Hollywood movies. Landing in that glamorous, semi-tropical paradise, they were both grateful and resentful. The novelist Alfred Döblin, for example, hated his screenwriting job at MGM but felt that losing it was even worse. The Hungarian S Z Sakall, who played the waiter Carl in Casablanca (1942), summed up the ambivalent experience in his memoirs: The Story of Cuddles: My Life Under Emperor Francis Joseph, Adolf Hitler and the Warner Brothers (1954). Casablanca superbly portrays exiles on the edge of the African continent waiting, sometimes hopelessly, for exit visas. The cast and crew were mainly European, and Bogart, who represents America, helps them escape and survive. When Jigee praised innovative American films and the exiles claimed, “oh, that was done in Berlin in the twenties,” she wittily replied, “if fascism ever comes to America, they’ll say, ‘Oh, we had that in Germany long ago'”.

Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel prospered in exile while most other writers failed; Ernst Toller, Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig committed suicide. The novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who lost his houses and possessions in both Germany and France, regretfully wrote, “I never learned my lesson. I would always begin building over again, then cling spiritually and literally to what I had built, confident that this time I must surely be able to keep it.” By contrast, Vladimir Nabokov, who lost millions when he fled Russia during the Revolution, never bought homes in America and Switzerland. He knew he could never replace the grandeur he had lost and was fearful of losing everything again.

Salka was a warm, witty and gemütlich hostess. On Sunday afternoons at her house many famous figures — from Johnny Weissmuller, who played Tarzan, to Arnold Schoenberg, who wrote discordant twelve-tone music — gathered for animated talk and inside information about Hollywood stars and studios. (When I taught at UCLA in the 1960s and lived on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, I was less than a mile from Salka’s house at 165 Mabery Road but didn’t know about her.) She continued to act dramatically in her own salon and remained the centre of attention. Rifkind claims that Thomas Mann loved “the sense of being looked after and cared for” at her house, though he lived in luxury with his devoted wife and daughter. Isherwood, who spoke fluent German and lived for a time in Salka’s house, got fed up with these celebrity parties and condemned them as “huge, expensively fed gatherings of bores”.

Salka used her formidable energy to save the lives of many Jewish exiles. She besieged influential friends to help get visas and provide guarantees of financial support in America, then found them jobs when the refugees arrived. She sometimes supported her whole family and all the impoverished people she took into her house. She eventually brought her aged mother to America, but could not rescue her younger brother, murdered by the Nazis.

Rifkind gives a distorted account of Salka’s futile attempt to help Schoenberg write music for MGM’s pictures. She didn’t warn him about the strict rules, including the need for humble deference, nor instruct him on how to deal with all-powerful studio executives. Schoenberg thought all movie music was garbage, had no respect for Irving Thalberg who wanted only “lovely music,” and realised that his own work and temperament were hopelessly inappropriate. By refusing to accommodate Thalberg, one of the most enlightened producers, Schoenberg lost his one great chance to earn a high salary. In this episode Salka was not, as Rifkind says, “the diplomat with a firm grasp of the complexity of both milieus” and did not “soften the boundaries between high culture and commerce in Hollywood”. The meeting, in fact, was a humiliating disaster.

                                          Greta Garbo, circa 1930, Salka Viertel is on Greta's immediate right,  on the left sipping tea is actress Française Rosay, Wilhelm Sörensen and André Berley are in the background.

                                         

Salka played opposite Greta Garbo in the German movie version of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie (1930) and Garbo, 16 years younger than Salka, was her closest friend in Los Angeles. The rise and fall of Salka’s screenwriting career, as a Garbo specialist from 1933 to 1943, was closely connected to MGM’s greatest star. Garbo came from a poor Swedish background, was poorly educated and — created by the studio — had no authentic life and was emotionally crippled by fame. Rifkind states that “Salka found Garbo intelligent, totally unaffected and droll,” but does not describe any conversation that took place during several decades, apart from general ideas and scripts for Garbo’s films. Salka had at least one lesbian affair and Garbo had many, including one with Mercedes de Acosta, whom Rifkind mentions without stating her sexual tastes. She does not discuss how Garbo’s lesbianism affected her friendship with Salka.

Rifkind wildly inflates the artistic merit of Queen Christina (1933), Salka’s most successful movie for Garbo (pictured). She exclaims that “the ‘memorising this room’ scene is one of the most poignant in film history” and calls the final shot “one of the immortals in film history”. The line of dialogue she quotes, “we need new wine in the old bottles,” is an obvious cliché. In fact, this costume drama (which can be seen on YouTube) now seems stilted, wooden, dated and dull. When the queen abdicates, Garbo declares in a strong Swedish accent, “I haf no joyce,” which played well when Edward VIII abdicated in 1936. Garbo herself wrote, “I am so ashamed of Christina. Just imagine our queen abdicating for the sake of a little Spaniard.”

Strangely enough, Rifkind does not discuss Salka and Garbo’s far greater collaboration Anna Karenina (1935) or Garbo’s best picture, Ninotschka (1939), written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett and directed by Ernst Lubitsch. After Anna Karenina, Salka kept searching for, but never found, a suitable vehicle for Garbo. She had as many as 17 other writers on her scripts, but refused to work with a French wartime collaborator who later came to Hollywood. Her movie The Girl from Leningrad, about a wounded soldier and nurse, imitated Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and was never made. Garbo thought The Painted Veil (1934) was rubbish and Salka repressed all memories of it. Two-Faced Woman (1941) was a humiliating failure that made Garbo abandon her acting career. Salka blamed the producer’s unrealistic demands for an oxymoronic script that was “original but familiar, unusual but popular, moralistic but sexy, true but improbable, tender but violent, slick but a highbrow masterpiece”.

In 1943, Garbo backed out of her last project and Salka’s MGM contract was terminated. After supporting so many people and donating generously to refugees’ charities, she was suddenly out of work. Garbo cruelly insisted, “I have done enough for you. I cannot do more.” Peter Viertel stated that she was “not all that great a friend. Actually, she used my mother more than my mother used her”. Lubitsch fiercely reproached Garbo by declaring, “You threw an old friend to the wolves. You have been in Hollywood long enough to know how much damage you have done to Salka.”

Rifkind’s book, though lively and interesting, has serious flaws. To justify her work —though Salka is certainly worth writing about — Rifkind laments the absence of real women in books about Hollywood and complains that women have been “virtually erased” (i.e., ignored). But on the very next page she lists six books that emphasise the role of women. As if to answer her, Aldous Huxley imagined a futuristic fantasy of a women’s Hollywood without men: “Warner Sisters, Louisa B Mayer, United Artistes and Twentieth Century Vixen.”

Rifkind dedicates her book to as many as seven people (there ought to be a limit) as if she feared this would be her only one. Her index is poor and omits many important names. She makes a few errors: Paul Kohner was an agent (not a director); Dinard is on the Normandy coast (not Brittany); Jews in Nazi-occupied Ukraine wore yellow stars (not blue); Scott Fitzgerald was not anti-Semitic. Her style is sometimes banal: “the wheels of time and change were turning”; “Germany and America were gazing at each other across an ocean”; Salka and Berthold “had not yet become their full selves”.

Rifkind tediously repeats that Salka did charitable work at least forty times, as if saying the same thing over and over again makes it more significant. (She also mentions that Salka earned $650 a week three times in twelve pages.) In four different places she impossibly claims that as Heinrich and Nelly Mann escaped from France she carried him over the Pyrenees. In fact, Evelyn Juers’ biography of Heinrich states, with significant qualifications, that Nelly “sometimes almost carried him”. Rifkind says Nelly was a “bar hostess,” though she had actually been a prostitute; she later became an alcoholic and killed herself in 1944.

Rifkind constantly drops the names of the Viertels’ famous friends but never describes these supposed friendships. Albert Einstein, for example, is thrice mentioned in passing as a friend, and Katharine Hepburn makes a sudden appearance as a putative friend two pages from the end. Instead of describing in detail Salka’s real friendship with Peter’s great pal Irwin Shaw, she offers an unintentionally absurd sentence that describes Shaw’s son having “hockey practice in Salka’s tiny kitchen”. We also need to know more about which six languages Salka spoke; the themes and value of Berthold’s oft-mentioned poetry; why Hitler hated Vienna (the city of his youthful poverty and rejection by the Academy of Arts); how all the family and many guests fitted into her crowded house; how Thalberg could “overthrow” Louis Mayer who owned the studio; and the love affair of Simone de Beauvoir and Ivan Moffat. Rifkind quotes Fred Zinnemann’s belief that André Malraux’s Man’s Fate “was the Bible of his generation,” but doesn’t note that in 1969 he was filming this novel in Singapore when the studio suddenly cancelled the project.

Rifkind gives an inaccurate account of the novels and reputations of Thomas and Heinrich Mann. She contradicts herself by stating that Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) was “the most influential of all the Weimar era novels” and also that Thomas Mann was “the most exalted writer of the Weimar era”. She then confuses matters even more by asking whether Thomas or Heinrich was the greater writer, claiming that Heinrich was “equally illustrious,” though Thomas had won the Nobel Prize in 1929 and quoting Heinrich acknowledging Thomas’ superior reputation. She absurdly calls Thomas’ turgid Joseph and His Brothers tetralogy, rather than The Magic Mountain, “the finest work of his career”. She also misjudges Thomas’ political views by stating that his democratic socialism conflicted with Salka’s pro-Roosevelt liberalism, though Thomas was a great admirer and personal acquaintance of Roosevelt. Rifkind’s structure is also weak. She covers Salka’s last 25 years in 20 pages, the last nine in only two pages. Since Rifkind’s editor was sleeping at the switch, some of the people she effusively thanks in the five pages of acknowledgments should have warned her about all her weaknesses.

In her last years, Salka gave drama lessons and hustled for scripts. She suffered from Parkinson’s disease and died in Klosters, Switzerland, where Peter lived with Deborah Kerr. The Kindness of Strangers (1969), Salka’s vivid memoir and main source for this book, takes its title from Blanche DuBois’ famous farewell in A Streetcar Named Desire: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Rifkind’s biography makes clear that Salka was famous for dispensing kindness to strangers, rather than receiving it.

Salka Viertel and the Hollywood exiles. By Jeffrey Meyers. The Article , March 15, 2020.

                                                     Greta Garbo and Salka Viertel

Back in the day (the late thirties and early forties), many of the Central European cultural émigrés in flight from Hitler’s depredations back home who’d found themselves improbably beached on the West Coast of the United States used to entertain themselves with the melancholy joke about the two dachshunds who meet on the palisade in Santa Monica. “Here it’s true I’m a dachshund,” the one admits to the other, “but in the old country I was a Saint Bernard.”

The west side of Los Angeles was rife with erstwhile Saint Bernards in those days, and in her splendidly evocative (if somewhat lamely titled) 1968 memoir, The Kindness of Strangers (being reissued this month by New York Review Books), the onetime Max Reinhardt actress turned Greta Garbo scenarist Salka Viertel regales her readers with countless representative tales of fish decidedly out of water, to vary the metaphor slightly—Sergei Eisenstein, for instance (though he had come to Hollywood and signed a yearlong contract at Paramount for reasons somewhat different from those of his German and Austrian counterparts).

Salka, who through much of that time served as the Russian master’s closest local support and confidant, begins her account of that bollixed year with a typically priceless sentence: “As soon as Eisenstein arrived, Upton Sinclair, who had most impressive friends, gave a picnic lunch for him at the ranch of Mr. Gillette, the razorblade millionaire.” From there, she goes on to detail the story of how Sinclair’s wife mobilized a group of idle Pasadena millionaire wives to sponsor Eisenstein’s filming expedition to Mexico, with patrons and director soon falling out catastrophically. Before long, the whole project went down in flames, leaving a heartbroken Eisenstein to return to his Stalinist homeland. Salka likewise tells stories of Schoenberg and Irving Thalberg at ludicrous cross-purposes over a possible score for the latter’s production of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, and of Heinrich Mann (brother of Thomas and author back in Germany of massive historical novels as well as the tale upon which the Emil Jannings–Marlene Dietrich classic The Blue Angel had been based) and Bertolt Brecht (arguably the greatest playwright of his era)—all of them utterly squandered by a studio system that had no idea what to do with them.

Most accounts of such calamities characterize them as instances of the philistine provincialism of the coarse American rubes who headed the Hollywood studios. (Salka herself does so some of the time.) The reality, though, was somewhat more nuanced and complex, for many of the studio heads were immigrants themselves, Eastern European shtetl Jews from the immediately prior generation who’d been looked down upon (as hugely inconvenient embarrassments) by their haute-bourgeois assimilated Jewish cousins in Vienna and Berlin and Munich and therefore hurried along to Amsterdam and Bremen and Hamburg and onward to New York as quickly as possible. Once in Hollywood, these fiercely ambitious eastern Jews set about fashioning and veritably inventing the American dream. The late arrival of those once supercilious western Jews set the stage for a certain degree of class-cultural revenge.

Still, many in Hollywood, with Salka and her husband, Berthold, among the leading figures, did raise vast sums to bring leading European cultural figures, desperate in their flight from Hitler, to Hollywood, going on to help secure many of them at least temporary employ in the studios. And Salka, for her part, made of her home on Mabery Road the site of weekly Sunday afternoon salon-like gatherings (featuring her exceptional cooking), where the likes of the Manns (both sets), Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, the Schoenbergs, the Stravinskys, Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler, Otto Klemperer’s clan,  the Max Reinhardts, Bertolt Brecht, and countless other such Saint Bernards (including, I suspect, my own grandparents) would rub shoulders with the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Johnny Weissmuller, Greta Garbo, Edward G. Robinson, and other Hollywood luminaries (as well as Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, the latter of whom had taken up residence in the garage apartment behind the main house). Many of Salka’s best yarns revolve around these gatherings on the rim of the Pacific—including one in particular about a seventieth birthday party for Heinrich Mann at which, before the meal could be served, his brother Thomas rose up and pulled a long, many-paged peroration in honor of his brother out of his suit pocket and proceeded somberly to declaim it (as the roast overcooked in the kitchen), whereupon Heinrich responded by rising up in thanks, pulling a similarly hefty peroration in honor of Thomas out of his own suit pocket, and soberly going on to read it in its entirety.

Salka’s account of those terrible years—“years of the devil,” in the words of her secretary—is hardly limited, however, to the fate of the grand and famous; she is just as attentive to the lives of the more modestly anonymous: onetime doctors and lawyers, for example, who were forced to take up employment as chauffeurs and housemaids (Salka notes how, what with the sudden transfer of local black people into the wartime ship- and plane-building industries, such fields had recently opened up), or, for that matter, such regular everyday Americans as the sweet lady over at the Santa Monica office of Western Union with whom she became friends in the course of trying to keep tabs on her world-wandering husband and the far-flung members of her own family, some still stranded behind enemy lines.

“The unconcerned sunbathers on the beach, their hairless bodies glistening and brown,” she writes at one point,

the gigantic trucks rumbling on the highway, the supermarkets with their mountains of food, the studios with the oh-so-relaxed employees, the chatting extras pouring out from the stages at lunch time, the pompous executives marching to their “exclusive dining room” or the barbershop, stopping to chat with the endearing “young talent”—all these familiar scenes were a nerve-wracking contrast to the war horror.

And indeed, throughout its extraordinary middle half, Salka’s memoir shifts back and forth between the grim comedy of life in the studios and the anguish of the war (the terrible reports of the slaughters on the various fronts as her sons, all the while, are coming of age and itching to hurl themselves into the fray; the increasingly desperate rumors of rampaging ethnic carnage as one by one she nevertheless manages to extract her sister and older brother and presently even her mother, the latter by way of an epic sequence of bureaucratic interventions, out of the maelstrom, her mother then coming to live with her, even as the fate of her younger brother, the soccer player, grows increasingly uncertain).

                                                The Painted Veil (1934)

In the studios, however, Salka seemed to glide from success to success, her friendship with Garbo becoming ever more intimate and inseparable. Salka cobbled together and often coauthored the scripts for films in which the star got cast, variously, as the doctor’s adulterous wife in an adaptation of Maugham’s The Painted Veil, and then as Maria Walewska (Napoleon’s adulterous Polish lover), Marie Curie (the adulterous Polish Nobel Prize–winning chemist), and Anna Karenina (the legendary Russian … well, you get the idea). She is wonderful at telling stories of the hurdles these projects had to surmount: the meddling of midlevel studio mucky-mucks and the countervailing antics in the various writers’ rooms. One of her favorite writing partners was Sam Behrman, such that

 “when Sam asked me to dictate to the secretary the shots of Anna’s suicide, I truly regretted that this was the last scene of the film.  Walking up and down I described the night train approaching relentlessly—the lights from the carriage windows on Anna’s face—her running down the embankment and throwing herself between the cars, then—a prostrated figure on the rails—the train disappearing in darkness—and last, a woman’s handbag on the embankment.

“And that’s what’s left of a human being,” I concluded, almost in tears, and turned to Sam who burst into roars of laughter.  For years thereafter these words remained our special code.  We signed letters and telegrams, “What’s left of a human being …”

Which, come to think of it, would have made a much, much better title for this whole book: Salka Viertel’s What’s Left of a Human Being.

Because for all her success, the life was exhausting, and as the war came to an end, her own began to fall apart: her marriage with Berthold was continuing to deteriorate, love affairs were ending badly, and the perversities of studio life were becoming less and less endurable. One day Brecht drove up to the house on Mabery Road with an urgent series of questions—“Why do we have to struggle so financially? Why shouldn’t we be able to do as well as any Hollywood hack?”—to which she replied:

Because what the producers want is an original but familiar, unusual but popular, moralistic but sexy, true but improbable, tender but violent, slick but highbrow masterpiece.  When they have that, then they can “work on it” and make it “commercial” to justify their high salaries.

In 1947, Salka, now at Warner Brothers, was completing the screenplay for one of her relatively few non-Garbo, non-adulterous films—this one, Deep Valley, an Ida Lupino/Dane Clark vehicle. One day the studio workers went out on strike, and Salka, like most of the writers, honored the picket line. Salka contributed to the strike fund as well, although her writing partner on that film refused to be intimidated by communists and ostentatiously crossed the line.

“It was customary at Warner Brothers,” Salka writes, “that when a film was to be previewed, the producers, director, writers and technicians (but not the actors) who had worked on it dined with Mr. Warner.” And so, some months later, just before the preview, she reported to a gathering in the executive dining room, experiencing, as she put it, an atmosphere she suspected was not unlike “the Gemutlichkeit when Stalin’s staff was dining with their boss.” There Mr. Warner pontificated on the the communist menace and how terribly the Soviets had treated the Jews during the war, finally turning to ask Salka’s opinion. No sooner had she begun speaking, however, than her unctuous cowriter “interrupted smilingly, ‘Salka is a communist, Mr. Warner.’ ”

It was supposed to be a joke—but it prompted Blanke [the film’s producer] to jump to my defense: “She is not!” he said. “One need not be a communist to say that Soviet anti-semitism is not to be compared to the horrors that the Nazis committed.”

Be that as it may, and notwithstanding the subsequent success of the film’s premiere (after which Mr. Warner expressed particular satisfaction with the screenplay), that was to be the last time Salka was to work in a major studio, “though it took me several years to realize why.”

Excerpted from Lawrence Weschler’s introduction to The Kindness of Strangers, by Salka Viertel, reissued by New York Review Books.

Salka Viertel’s Forgotten Account of Old Hollywood. By Lawrence Wechsler. The Paris Review, January  11, 2019.