276°
Posted 20 hours ago

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

£12.995£25.99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Melnyk, Lidia (2021). "Steuermann, Gimpel, Baller – Between the Vienna Dream and Hollywood Reality: World-Famous Jewish Pianists and Their Routes From Galicia to Vienna and the USA". In Pijarowska, Aleksandra (ed.). Music – The Cultural Bridge: Essence, Context, References (PDF). Wrocław: Karol Lipiński Academy of Music. p.113 . Retrieved 30 June 2022. The real explanation for the German literary migration to L.A., though, has to do with the steady growth of a network of friendly connections, and at its center was Salka Viertel. Donna Rifkind pays tribute to this irresistibly dynamic figure in “The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood” (Other Press), and New York Review Books recently reissued Viertel’s addictive memoir, “The Kindness of Strangers.” Viertel worked tirelessly to obtain visas for endangered artists, and to help them find their footing when they arrived. Weimar on the Pacific might never have existed without her. In addition to her memoir, Salka Viertel left behind a trove of letters and diaries, much of which has found a home at the extraordinary center for exile literature called the Deutsches Literaturarchiv (DLAM), in the town of Marbach in southern Germany. Salka’s letters to and from her husband Berthold Viertel are of world-class literary quality in several languages. The eloquence of the German letters was clarified for me by two marvelously sensitive translators, Pamela Selwyn, who worked with me at the DLAM, and Friedel Schmoranzer in Los Angeles. When I first arrived at the DLAM and introduced myself to the archivists, one of them said to me, “We’re so glad you are here for Salka. Almost everyone comes for Berthold.” The balance has shifted since my visit, with research on Salka Viertel accelerating among European scholars, but for me, as an American, the archivist’s sentiment still resonates. Rifkind gives a distorted account of Salka’s futile attempt to help Schoenberg write music for MGM’s pictures. She didn’t warn him about the strict rules, including the need for humble deference, nor instruct him on how to deal with all-powerful studio executives. Schoenberg thought all movie music was garbage, had no respect for Irving Thalberg who wanted only “lovely music,” and realised that his own work and temperament were hopelessly inappropriate. By refusing to accommodate Thalberg, one of the most enlightened producers, Schoenberg lost his one great chance to earn a high salary. In this episode Salka was not, as Rifkind says, “the diplomat with a firm grasp of the complexity of both milieus” and did not “soften the boundaries between high culture and commerce in Hollywood”. The meeting, in fact, was a humiliating disaster.

Da es sich nur um ein Wohnviertel ohne speziellen Namen handelt, kam wohl jemand auf die Idee, bei Google Maps einen Namen einzutragen – denn dies kann jeder beantragen, und jeder kann auch Änderungen vorschlagen. Doch keine einzige Suchmaschine findet Schilder, Adressen oder Beschreibungen, dass der Häuserkomplex wirklich „Hitler Viertel“ heißt. 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." 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. His father's life was anything but easy, Lucarini said, since no one was around to help or even help him to understand and process what had happened. The programme of Italianization was particularly forcefully applied in schools, aiming at the destruction of the German school system. [7] As of 1928, Italian had become the only language of instruction in 760 South Tyrolean classes, affecting over 360 schools and 30,000 pupils. [7] Likewise, German Kindergarten were required to use Italian, while substitutes were forced to shut down. [7] German teachers were systematically dismissed on the grounds of "insufficient didactics", or transferred to the south, from where Italian teachers were recruited instead. [7] Degrees from Austrian or German universities became valid only through an additional stay of one year at an Italian university. [7]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. Viertel was born Salomea Sara Steuermann in Sambor, a city then in the province of Galicia, [2] which was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but today is in western Ukraine. Her father, Joseph Steuermann, was a lawyer and the mayor of Sambor [2] before antisemitism forced him to renounce his office. Her mother, Auguste ( née Amster) Steuermann, died in 1952 at Viertel's home in Santa Monica. Her siblings were the composer and pianist Eduard Steuermann; Rosa (1891–1972), married from 1922 until her death to the actor and director Josef Gielen; and Polish national football player Zygmunt Steuermann, who perished during the Holocaust. [3]

Nevertheless, Salka’s three sons managed to have successful lives. Hans became a linguistics scholar at MIT. Thomas worked at the Los Angeles Department for Social Services. Peter (who was my friend and introduced me to the bullfighters who knew Hemingway) graduated from Dartmouth in 1941. He served as a marine in the Allied landings in the Solomon Islands, won a Silver Star, and, as a spymaster with the OSS, parachuted anti-Nazis into wartime Germany. The beautiful Jigee Schulberg left her husband for Peter, who married her in 1943. Both had affairs, and Peter’s lovers included Joan Fontaine and Ava Gardner. Jigee became an alcoholic and drug addict and, in a ghastly accident, burned herself to death. Peter — who’d brought out a novel, The Canyon, when he was nineteen — wrote the screenplays of The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea, became a great friend of John Huston and Hemingway, and published a brilliant memoir, Dangerous Friends (1992), about them. He finally had a long and happy marriage to the elegant Scottish actress, Deborah Kerr. Mann’s comfortable existence depended on a canny marketing plan devised by his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. The scholar Tobias Boes, in his recent book, “Thomas Mann’s War” (Cornell), describes how Knopf remade a difficult, quizzical author as the “Greatest Living Man of Letters,” an animate statue of European humanism. The supreme ironist became the high dean of the Book-of-the-Month Club. The florid and error-strewn translations of Helen Lowe-Porter added to this ponderous impression. (John E. Woods’s translations of the major novels, published between 1993 and 2005, are far superior.) Yet Knopf’s positioning enabled Mann to assume a new public role: that of spokesperson for the anti-Nazi cause. Boes writes, “Because he so manifestly stood above the partisan fray, Mann was able to speak out against Hitler and be perceived as a voice of reason rather than be dismissed as an agitator.” Rifkind wildly inflates the artistic merit of Queen Christina (1933), Salka’s most successful movie for Garbo (pictured). She exclaims that “the ‘memorising this room’ scene is one of the most poignant in film history” and calls the final shot “one of the immortals in film history”. The line of dialogue she quotes, “we need new wine in the old bottles,” is an obvious cliché. In fact, this costume drama (which can be seen on YouTube) now seems stilted, wooden, dated and dull. When the queen abdicates, Garbo declares in a strong Swedish accent, “I haf no joyce,” which played well when Edward VIII abdicated in 1936. Garbo herself wrote, “I am so ashamed of Christina. Just imagine our queen abdicating for the sake of a little Spaniard.”Viertel’s employment at MGM supported both her family and, by 1936, her unofficial ambassadorship to Hollywood’s mushrooming immigrant community. (Rifkind cites California historian Kevin Starr, who estimates that 10,000 from Germany and Austria left their homelands for Los Angeles between 1933 and 1941, “the most complete migration of artists and intellectuals in European history.”) Salka was the advocate of choice for immigrant artists, whether they were French actor Charles Boyer or composer Franz Waxman Salka was a warm, witty and gemütlich hostess. On Sunday afternoons at her house many famous figures — from Johnny Weissmuller, who played Tarzan, to Arnold Schoenberg, who wrote discordant twelve-tone music — gathered for animated talk and inside information about Hollywood stars and studios. (When I taught at UCLA in the 1960s and lived on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, I was less than a mile from Salka’s house at 165 Mabery Road but didn’t know about her.) She continued to act dramatically in her own salon and remained the centre of attention. Rifkind claims that Thomas Mann loved “the sense of being looked after and cared for” at her house, though he lived in luxury with his devoted wife and daughter. Isherwood, who spoke fluent German and lived for a time in Salka’s house, got fed up with these celebrity parties and condemned them as “huge, expensively fed gatherings of bores”. Peter Viertel died at age 86 in November 2007. He not only left his mark on the OSS, but in Hollywood as a writer, collaborating with such greats as Ernest Hemingway and John Huston to turn novels into screenplays and successful movies. Kurz danach werdet ihr eine Mail von Google bekommen, dass die Änderung geprüft wird. Wir hoffen, dass Google die Namensänderung annehmen wird, je mehr Leute dies beantragen – denn die Bewohner selbst haben schon genug Spott dafür abbekommen, in Swastika-Gebäuden zu wohnen. Auch interessant: Gibt es diese „Geierbienen“ tatsächlich, die sich von Fleisch und Aas ernähren und daraus „Fleisch-Honig“ produzieren? The Hitler family, from which also the motherly grandmother derived, belonged for generations into the dominion of Landgraf Fürstenberg, who resided on the middle-age castle of Weitra and managed the vast sourrounding forests.

During her marriage Salka gave in to her impulses and need to retaliate. She loved extravagantly and heedlessly, defiantly asserting her right to have sex with both women and men and to ignore the emotional damage she caused. She explained her love life by telling Isherwood, “if a man wants a woman enough, he can have her. Absolutely. It’s only a question of time and place.” Her first serious, two-year affair was with her screenwriter-neighbour Oliver Garrett. An open liaison, it was tolerated, if not endorsed, by their spouses, who ignored the brutti momenti and social constraints. Her next lover, in 1933, was the German director Gottfried Reinhardt, 22 years younger than the 44-year-old Salka. Throughout the next decade they were emotionally, physically and even professionally involved when he became her producer at MGM. Rifkind calls this a “civilised arrangement,” yet buried grievances, boiling tensions and deepening wounds caused bitter quarrels. Rifkind naively accepts Salka’s exculpatory claims that her three “sons were undamaged by their parents’ complex relationship” and soon “adjusted to the domestic changes, as children do, disregarding the opera buffa bed-switching.” But children who’ve experienced their mother’s adultery are often torn between loyalty to the older father and younger lover, and can be deeply wounded by the moral transgressions and emotional scars. Rifkind is] a superlative chronicler of Old Hollywood…This tour de force of a biography tells the story of an overlooked hero who helped make Hollywood’s golden age gleam.”— Shelf AwarenessPrager, Katharina. (2007) "Ich bin nicht gone Hollywood!" Salka Viertel – Ein Leben in Theater und Film, ISBN 978-3-7003-1592-6, Wien: Braumüller Verlag.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment