Dissonance Among the Exiles

This excellent story from Anthony Mostrom at the LA Times about the expats from Nazi Germany in 1933 and how many of Germany's creative geniuses wound up living in Pacific Palisades and socializing with each other at a palatial villa known as Miramar.

Some of Germany's and Austria's most creative minds fled the Nazis and settled in Los Angeles. They would gather at a Pacific Palisades villa, but not all was harmonious.

By Anthony Mostrom
October 10, 2010

Originally known as Miramar and now dubbed Villa Aurora, this Pacific Palisades estate was a gathering place for German and Austrian expatriates during World War II. It was owned by author Lion Feuchtwanger and frequented by some of Europe's greatest artists, musicians and thinkers. (Annie Wells, Los Angeles Times / March 15, 2005)

"I have made a discovery," the composer Arnold Schoenberg said in 1921, "which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next one hundred years!" These ecstatic words ushered in the birth of the Austrian's radically innovative 12-tone method of composition and unleashed a near-century's worth of dissonance and atonality in avant-garde classical music. But if Expressionism in music was considered disturbing and "decadent" by many in Weimar Germany, Schoenberg was just one of many cultural avant-gardists who were marked for harassment, imprisonment or even death once Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists rose to power.

When that day arrived Jan. 30, 1933, the exodus of German (and later, Austrian) musicians, painters, writers and scientists started out as a trickle and by the late 1930s had become a flood tide.

California soon gained a bumper crop of geniuses. One of the first to arrive in Los Angeles along with Schoenberg was Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a Jewish Viennese composer of lush, traditionally flavored music who arrived here in 1934 to write film scores for Warner Bros. Otto Klemperer, the towering conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic at the Kroll Opera House, gave up his initial naivete about "the new Germany" and accepted a post as conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1933. And some of the most famous German writers of the 20th century — Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and the 1929 Nobel Prize winner for literature, Thomas Mann — all would call Los Angeles home for the duration of World War II.

Feuchtwanger had seen the coming danger earlier than most. In 1930 he wrote "Erfolg" (Success), a work that many consider to be the first anti-Hitler novel. His best-selling historical novel, "Jud Suess," an unflattering portrait of an 18th century Jewish financier named Josef Suess Oppenheimer, could have made him a hero to the Nazis, but they hated him anyway because he was Jewish. Later, the Nazis produced a vicious film portrayal of "Suess" without mentioning Feuchtwanger's novel at all.

After arriving in L.A. in 1940, the Feuchtwangers learned of a palatial three-story house, then standing vacant, on Paseo Miramar in Pacific Palisades.

Originally christened "Miramar" when it was built by The Times in 1928 as a "demonstration house" to attract interest in Palisades development, the house was in serious disrepair. The Feuchtwangers got it for a song, $9,000, and proceeded to fill several rooms with books. Mann moved to the Palisades a year later.

According to Imogen von Tannenberg, who today oversees the artist-in-residence program for European artists at the former Feuchtwanger estate (now known as Villa Aurora), not all of the exiles in Los Angeles got on well with each other.

Story continues here: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-1010-then-20101010,0,4600988.story

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