The Sun and Her Stars by Donna Rifkind

Author:Donna Rifkind
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

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BY NOVEMBER 1940 the Feuchtwangers, Manns, Werfels, Polgars, and Döblins had all arrived in Los Angeles, and by the following May they were all beginning to acclimate. Different mountains, different sky, different sea—but oh, how like Sanary it seemed. For some, in the early throes of giddy relief, it was even better. Marta Feuchtwanger found the beauty of the Pacific shoreline more informal than the Côte d’Azur. “Here you feel at home in the landscape,” she said; “here you live with the ocean and nature; it’s part of your life.” Franz Werfel wrote to his parents: “The Riviera is just trash compared to this.” He and Alma found a house in the hills just above the Hollywood Bowl, where he settled down to finish The Song of Bernadette. His garden was full of fruit trees and roses that bloomed in every season. His health improved. He felt ten years younger.

Not everyone was as enthusiastic. When asked how she felt in America, the German poet Annette Kolb answered, “Grateful and unhappy.” Alfred Döblin and his wife moved into a small apartment in Hollywood, where Döblin complained, as Berthold Viertel often did, that “pedestrians had become extinct…people are born as drivers…LA is the opposite of a place I’d choose to live in, since I happen to love walking amongst crowds.” Salka did her best to ease the grumbling, taking newcomers to the Farmer’s Market on Fairfax and the Grand Central Market downtown, both of which could be ambled through like the European markets to which they were accustomed. Döblin found other reasons to despise his new life. The screenwriting job at Metro which had been secured for him by the European Film Fund was a demeaning distraction from his literary career. He wrote to his fellow exile Hermann Kesten in March 1941 that “the people here don’t need our stories, they already have vaults full of them,” and, four months later, “I do not believe one can at the same time serve Louis B. Mayer and one’s own work.”

Thomas Mann was glad to know that his brother Heinrich’s first impressions of Los Angeles were encouraging, and that his prospects for success in Hollywood were good. There was even talk that one of his books might once again be made into a film, as had his novel Professor Unrat. But the initial optimism did not last long. Salka wrote that Heinrich “appeared an odd figure in the Burbank studio” where Warner Bros., in cooperation with the European Film Fund, had set him up as a screenwriter at six thousand dollars per year. Heinrich himself seemed rather baffled by the position, writing to Thomas about his reluctance to come into the studio “to waste the time between 10 and 1 in consultation and chatter.”

Heinrich and Nelly were renting a small house in Hollywood and were soon to move to an apartment on Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. “Care for the house and the car fall to my wife,” Heinrich wrote; “everything is doubtful when it’s meant for an uncertain period of time.

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