Ehrhard Bahr. Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. xvii + 358 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-520-25128-1; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-520-25795-5.
Reviewed by Benjamin Robinson (Department of Germanic Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington)
Published on H-German (November, 2007)
Er träumt von einer Palme
Many gracious and learned tours through the works of German exiles living in Los Angeles in the 1940s are found in Ehrhard Bahr's Weimar on the Pacific: wanderings along the subtle turns of dialectics; across the clean lines and glassy surfaces of mid-century modern architecture; through the dark passageways and dead ends of film noir; into the epic scenery of the common man and the claustrophobic studios of great ones. What is missing, however, is a sense of place. When I think of German refugee portraits of Los Angeles, I think of Klaus and Erica Mann's bacchanalias at the home of Emil Jannings and of Heinrich Mann's downtown desolation; I think of the awed FBI agent who interrogated Thomas Mann among his European Kulturgüter and the coveted and begrudged splendor of Lion Feuchtwanger's Villa Aurora. Bahr has many interesting things to say about the German exile experience, and succeeds in bringing together a fascinating and complementary range of exile works, but he does not give us the book he says he will, when he writes: "My study argues that there existed a specific German exile modernism in Los Angeles ... it is a sketch of the state of exile studies as they affect the history of Los Angeles ... a study of a significant chapter in the cultural history of Los Angeles ... and it intends to make the crisis of modernism its focus because it was an international crisis that found a specific German answer in Los Angeles" (pp. 8-9). Bahr dutifully cites Mike Davis's landmark work on Los Angeles, City of Quartz (1992), as well as Frederic Jameson, whose "cognitive mapping" of urban spaces has helped renew the field of urban geography pioneered in Germany by Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin. Beyond the occasional citation, however, the various frameworks suggested by these thinkers of the modern city--since developed in the work of people like Doreen Massey, David Harvey, and Edward Soja--play no role. Los Angeles results in being less a place than a criterion of selection.
That the Pacific metropolis disappears so quickly is unfortunate, because the thesis of a specific conjuncture of a European urban modernist sensibility with mid-century Los Angeles is a fascinating one. Bahr begins with a nice contrast between the "idyllic garden city" (p. 10) on the Pacific and New York City, raising questions about the urban physiognomy of modernism. He returns to this theme in his third chapter, on Bertolt Brecht's California poetry, starting with a wonderful reading of a poem in which Brecht compares Los Angeles to hell. Bahr notes that the striking moment of Brecht's reworking of a Shelley parody of London is the apparent inaptness of the comparison: hell, after all, is smoky and crowded, surely the demonic prototype for London, Berlin, and New York. The west side of Los Angeles is a green and pleasant land, and as Bahr points out, it took a poetic effort to make it into the alienated hell that is the precondition of the modern artist. "The Westside of Los Angeles, where Brecht and most of the exiles lived, was not as ugly as New York," notes Bahr, not without a touch of local pride; "Brecht's poem comparing Los Angeles to hell demonstrates that he needed to establish its ugliness in order to become productive as a poet on the Westside" (p. 84).
Unfortunately, Bahr leaves the notion of a phantasmatic modernist Los Angeles--which animated Lawrence Rickel's gonzo-Germanist The Case of California (1991)--undeveloped. Where he might have used Brecht's poem as a jumping-off point to explore how an imaginary Los Angeles was constructed by exiles to solve certain problems of modernism and exile, and how a real Los Angeles interrupted such constructions, he instead recurs to a liberal typology of right, left, and middle "modernism" to bear a considerable burden in his book. At its plainest, modernism seems to mean that a poem, essay, or novel is not to be taken at face value, but that it employs irony and ambiguity and other forms of figuration to achieve open-ended effects. Surely, one does not need to evoke exile, "the crisis of modernism" (p. 12), and urban alienation to arrive at these features of Brecht, Theodor Adorno, and Mann's work. Despite Bahr's normative embrace of such a general form of modernism, moreover, he winds up being quite literal-minded in choosing what counts as Californian in German exile literature--namely, the site of composition or a topographic allusion.
As disappointing as this downgrading of the significance of Los Angeles is, however, there are still many fine individual readings and suggestive arrangements of both major and lesser-known works in Bahr's detailed book. The discussion of Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, two icons of modern architecture, links an archetypical southern California "look" to two 1920s immigrants from German-speaking Europe. Bahr's achievement here is to expand a reader's sense of the variety of contributions made by European emigrants to United States modernism by connecting the built environment of Los Angeles to a particular cosmopolitan lineage. There is, however, a Eurocentric implication to a narrative concerned with celebrating the southern California legacy of a European intellectual group. Bahr might have engaged this implication more productively by showing the tensions between assimilation and nonconformism, between local architectural vernaculars like colonial Mission Style and international modernist influences, and by asking how these tensions were enacted in Schindler's and Neutra's work and biography. While Bahr notes that the two were emigrants, not anti-Nazi exiles, and cites Brecht's emphatic refusal of the emigrant label for himself, he does not play out the political implications of this distinction and explain how it affected Schindler's and Neutra's visions. Bahr does give us a fascinating discussion of Neutra's involvement in the Chavez Ravine public housing project, which was eventually quashed by conservative opposition to "socialist housing" (p. 166), but a reader can only imagine how the dynamics of this battle compared to those of public housing battles in Europe. Likewise, we see how Schindler used the rhetoric of health and hygiene in his architecture, especially his celebrated "Health House" for health guru Philip Lovell, but Bahr does not explore how a North American hygienic discourse is distinguished from that of the Weimar Lebensreform movement. Such discussions might have helped a reader better understand what was distinctly Angelino about Weimar on the Pacific and what local distinctions revealed about modernism's universalist aspirations.
Bahr's chapter on Franz Werfel is in itself a fascinating reconsideration of Werfel's literary and political conservatism, more generous than Walter Sokel's well-established account of 1959, and therefore able to provoke new questions about why so many European expressionists and avant-gardists were drawn to a vivid expression of Catholic faith. Likewise, the chapter on Alfred Döblin considers his massive and little-known historical epic, November 1918 (1949-50). As in the Werfel chapter, much can be found to admire in Bahr's readings of Döblin's "renegade modernism" and his turn from sectarian politics to naïve religion as the solution to a perceived crisis of modernity. In addition, several informative and thoughtful chapters deal with important episodes and figures of German exile culture. The book includes a brief political chapter on the National Committee for a Free Germany, instigated in Soviet POW camps, and the conflicted U.S. response to this organization. Chapters on Adorno, Mann, and Arnold Schoenberg are informative and stimulating and argue for a range of political and aesthetic directions within exile modernism.
Many subtle interpretations and interesting juxtapositions recommend Bahr's book. Assembling figures based on their ties to Los Angeles serves as an effective device for narrowing the scope of a volume on German exiles in the United States, and on that basis, Bahr is able to give detailed readings and to convey the sense of a lively community of thought. Weimar on the Pacific is not, however, the book about a specific Los Angeles topography of modernism that it aims to be. It operates, rather, with a normative modernist aesthetics and liberal cultural sensibility to interpret some important canonical figures of Weimar Germany in their period of U.S. exile.
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Citation:
Benjamin Robinson. Review of Bahr, Ehrhard, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
November, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13923
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