In the 1930s and 40s, 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.
Weimar on the Pacific is the first book to examine these artists and intellectuals as a group. Ehrhard Bahr studies selected works of Adorno, Horkheimer, Brecht, Lang, Neutra, Schindler, Döblin, Mann, and Schoenberg, weighing Los Angeles’s influence on them and their impact on German modernism. Touching on such examples as film noir and Thomas Mann’s
Doctor Faustus, Bahr shows how this community of exiles reconstituted modernism in the face of the traumatic political and historical changes they were living through.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Preface
Introduction
1. The Dialectic of Modernism
2. Art and Its Resistance to Society: Theodor W. Adornno’s Aethetic Theory
3. Bertolt Brecht’s California Poetry: Mimesis or Modernism?
4. The Dialectic of Modern Science: Brecht’s
Galileo
5. Epic Theater versus Film Noir: Bertolt Bretcht and Fritz Lang’s Anti-Nazi Film
Hangmen Also Die
6. California Modern as Immigrant Modernism: Architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph M. Schnidler
7. Between Modernism and Antimodernism: Franz Werfel
8. Renegade Modernism: Alfred Döblin’s Novel
Karl and Rosa
9. The Political Battleground of Exile Modernism: The Council for a Democratic Germany
10. Evil Germany versus Good Germany: Thomas Mann’s
Doctor Faustuc
11. A ‘True Modernist.’: Arnold Schoenberg
Conclusion: The Weimar Legacy of Los Angeles
Chronology
Appendices
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Ehrhard Bahr is distinguished professor emeritus of German at UCLA.
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