The Sun And Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood

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It is more often in the imaginative literature about Hollywood and the 1930s exiles, rather than in the histories, that women play prominent roles and emerge as fully fleshed characters: Anna Trautwein in Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Paris Gazette, for example; or Erich Maria Remarque’s heroines in Shadows in Paradise and The Night in Lisbon; and Salka herself, who appears in fictional form in Joseph Kanon’s Stardust, Elizabeth Frank’s Cheat and Charmer, Gavin Lambert’s Inside Daisy Clover, Christopher Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood, Irwin Shaw’s short story “Instrument of Salvation,” and, fleetingly, in the film The Way We Were. Yet these glimpses can’t compensate for the absence of real women in the copious nonfiction, where at best they are underrepresented and at worst virtually erased. Fortunately, but glacially, the landscape is changing. Martin Sauter’s Liesl Frank, Charlotte Dieterle, and the European Film Fund not only provides the first comprehensive study of the EFF but also properly credits Frank and Dieterle as the chief administrators of the fund—credit that has previously been granted to its more high-profile male directors, Paul Kohner and Ernst Lubitsch. In his book, Sauter aims specifically to remedy the exclusion of women in the histories of Hollywood and the antifascist emigration. He underscores Britishprofessor S. Jay Kleinberg’s creditable assertion that women are “systematically omitted from the accounts of the past. This has distorted the way we view the past; indeed it warps history by making it seem as though only men have participated in the events worthy of preservation.” Other scholars are also working to redress the oversight. Cari Beauchamp’s Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood; Erin Hill’s Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production; Evelyn Juers’s House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann; and Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun’s essay about Salka Viertel, “The Salon in Exile,” from Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation have all begun to fill in the blanks. Significant, too, is the robust state of exile-studies scholarship in Europe. Katharina Prager’s German-language biography of Salka Viertel, “Ich bin nicht gone Hollywood!, ”is especially noteworthy, as is her examination of Viennese modernism, Berthold Viertel: Eine Biografie der Wiener Moderne. But in America there is much more work to be done. 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.

In the 1990s, a commission consisting of the Professors Josef Breu (Vienna, representing Austria in the Toponymy commission of the UN), Peter Glatthard (Berne) and Carlo Alberto Mastrelli (Florence, current "Archivio per l'Alto Adige") failed as Mastrelli insisted on the fascist decrees, while Breu and Glatthard promoted the UN-Guidelines. [11] See also [ edit ] Santini writes of the photographer Wolf Suschitzsky who left Vienna in 1934 for London where his sister, fellow photographer and political activist Edith Tudor-Hart had moved the previous year, and of Stefan Lorant, co-founder of Picture Post, and another recent arrival, the photographer Bill Brandt. The German-language press, which was still published, was harassed by the authorities and subjected to censorship prior to publication. [6] In 1926 the fascist authorities began to publish their own German-language newspaper, the Alpenzeitung. [6] Other German-language papers were obliged to follow a strictly pro-regime editorial policy. [6] In 1923, three years after South Tyrol had been formally annexed, Italian place names, almost entirely based on the Prontuario dei nomi locali dell'Alto Adige, were made official by means of a decree. [2] The German name "Tyrol" was banned, likewise its derivants and compound words such as "Tyrolean" and "South Tyrolean". [2] German newspapers, publishing houses, organized clubs and associations, including the South Tyrolean Alpine Club had to be renamed, with the decree said to have been strictly enforced by Italian carabinieri on the ground. [2] The basis for these actions was a manifesto published by Ettore Tolomei on 15 July 1923, called the Provvedimenti per l'Alto Adige ("Measures for the Alto Adige"), becoming the blueprint for the Italianization campaign. [3] Its 32 measures were: [4] a b Oscar Benvenuto (ed.): " South Tyrol in Figures 2008", Provincial Statistics Institute of the Autonomous Province of South Tyrol, Bozen/Bolzano 2007, p. 19, Table 11Born and raised in Italy, Santini became a historian of German literature and lived in Munich and Berlin before settling in London in the mid-1990s. So, please tell me, if you find this subject interesting. If you do, I will soon continue translating some more into English. Mehrere Medien berichteten bereits im September 2015 über die Häuser: Die Bewohner des Villenkomplexes in Süditalien waren selbst überrascht, als sie feststellten, dass ihre Häuser von oben betrachtet wie riesige Hakenkreuze aussehen und der Link zu Google Maps viral ging.

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.

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Provvedimenti per l'Alto Adige, in: Gruber, Alfons: Südtirol unter dem Faschismus, Schriftenreihe des Südtiroler Kulturinstitutes 1, Bozen 1974, pp. 21f. That's also what the historical work is about, Schieder said: "This issue of collaboration must be more intensively investigated, because aspects very different from a pure resistance perspective have emerged."