Early Histories of Exile in Hollywood and the United States
Although primary and secondary literature relating directly to the EFF - or any other refugee organisation that emerged as a result of Hitler’s rise to power - is sparse, the related field of literature on exile is vast. The use of the term ‘literature on exile’ is a deliberate choice on my part in order not to confuse what has been written on exile with literature that was written in exile, which John Spalek refers to as exile literature (see: Spalek 1982: xi). Though references to the EFF in the literature on exile are often cursory and sometimes even inaccurate, the findings of exile scholars and researchers prove an important source of information concerning the Los Angeles émigré community in general. As literature on exile has spawned a whole subgenre of popular publications, for reasons of precision dividing the field into scholarly and journalistic approaches would seem appropriate.5
The first book on the broader topic of anti-Nazi emigration goes back to 1939 when Klaus and Erika Mann first published their collaboratively written Escape to Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939). To this day their book has remained a significant and invaluable reference work on exile. The Manns wrote their book from an anti-Nazi stance, as a clear statement against Nazi Germany and its annihilation of German culture, with the intention of drawing attention to the ‘other Germany’, in other words, those Germans who were not contaminated by Nazism. Owing to the extraordinary access both Manns had to various émigré circles that formed around the world - in Zürich, Paris, London, Los Angeles - their book has never lost validity. Klaus and Erika Mann not only lived in a remarkable number of places that became émigré hubs, but knew many exiled writers, directors, and actors intimately. Theirs is a tersely written, sharply observed book, that covers literary as well as filmic emigration. Escape to Life provides an early, yet comprehensive overview of exile while the book’s structure -starting with the political situation in Nazi Germany following Hitler’s takeover and then moving on to discuss various émigré hubs - makes it evident that it served as a blueprint for Jean-Michel Palmier’s arguably more ambitious Weimar en exile (Paris: Payot, 1988), published nearly fifty years later.
One of the first significant publications focussing exclusively on exiled German-Jewish writers appeared in 1947, when the former exile Alfred Kantorowicz, in collaboration with Richard Drews, published Verboten und verbrannt (Berlin: Ullstein, 1947), a first attempt at coming to terms with the extent and ramifications of literary exile. Also included in Verboten und verbrannt are ‘inner émigrés’ such as Erich Kästner and writers like Franz Kafka who, of course, had long been dead when the Nazis came to power, but whose inclusion is due to the central role played by the exiled writer Max Brod in Kafka’s life and the publication of his work. The body of Verboten und verbrannt consists of brief biographical sketches of nearly two hundred writers, followed by an excerpt of one of their works. Though Verboten und verbrannt is little more than a compendium of the literary exile, Kantorowicz and Drews explain in the introduction to their book that their aim was to
inspire curiosity; to provide a first, rough, non-sectionalised and not yet complete overview; a reference book, which gives an idea about the scope of those who were banned and burnt;6 nothing more and nothing less (Kantorowicz & Drews 1947: 10).
As a compendium of literary exile, published so shortly after the Holocaust, Verboten und verbrannt was certainly timely and fulfilled its documentary purpose. But a more comprehensive debate on exiled writers and their literary output only started almost twenty years later when in 1965 the exhibition Deutsche Exil-Literatur 1933-45 was opened at the German National Library in Frankfurt/ Main and subsequently travelled to 20 cities in and outside West Germany. This constituted the first significant attempt by West Germany to come to terms with its vanished literary heritage. In John Spalek’s assessment, the exhibition was of ‘seminal importance [...], stimulating] numerous other exhibits that served to call the public’s attention to the fact of the anti-Nazi emigration of the thirties’ (Spalek 1982: xvii). Spalek has also noted that already in the 1950s, several studies had appeared that examined the political emigration (see: Spalek 1982: xvi). Nonetheless, the effect of the Frankfurt exhibition was profound, for it certainly cannot be a coincidence that ‘the bulk of publications, especially on German literature in exile, occurred in the decade starting roughly in 1966 and continuing until about 1976’ (Spalek 1982: xvi).
The end of this decade saw two different publications on the topic of film exile, one of which marks the beginning of serious scholarly examination of exiled German-Jewish film artists. John Baxter’s The Hollywood Exiles (London: Macdonald & Jane’s, 1976) is a largely anecdotal account of European film artists from various European countries who came to live and work in Hollywood, starting in the 1920s. Although his book concludes with the forced emigration due to the rise of Nazism, Baxter’s book prefigured what would later become an important concern of film historians and exile researchers, inasmuch as he looks at the impact European film artists, writers, etc., had on Hollywood, starting with Lubitsch’s departure for Hollywood in 1923. Due to its journalistic style, Baxter’s book falls into the category of popular publications on exile, and thus is of limited consequence to the scholar today. However, seen in the context of its time, his was significant as one of the earliest works to consider the influence of Europeans on popular American culture. Moreover, Baxter’s book was also one of the earliest publications to - albeit briefly - mention the European Film Fund.
Considering the absence of scholarly interest since that date, it is interesting that 1976 was also the year in which the European Film Fund was first discussed in an academic context. In John Spalek and Joseph Strelka‘s, Deutsche Exilliteratur seit 1933, Band 1: Kalifornien (Bern: Franke, 1976), E. Bond Johnson attempts to recapitulate the history of the EFF and evaluate its role in the émigré community. However, although Bond Johnson had access to a number of primary sources - including personal testimonies from one of the key figures discussed in this thesis - a lack of empirical data, and the fact that exile research as a field of study to which he could refer was not yet in existence, make his account patchy and sometimes even downright inaccurate. He falls prey, for instance, to the often repeated error of confusing the European Film Fund with the European Relief Fund, which, in fact, was founded much later, after the EFF had already been dissolved. As mentioned earlier, Bond Johnson was well aware of the difficulty of writing about a subject with only limited sources to draw on. Thus he concludes his essay by saying,
the archival material on the EFF is still relatively scarce. Hopefully,
one day the activities of the Fund will be become clearer and its members deserve to be better known. [...] The more we know about the EFF, the better we will be able to understand the exile community, in which the EFF played a crucial role (Bond Johnson in Spalek & Strelka 1976: 144).
The fact that Bond Johnson himself pointed to the complexity and limitations of writing about a topic on which no reliable secondary sources exist, let alone archival material, represented a challenge for my own examination. Mindful of the blurry picture that has prevailed heretofore of the EFF, I was determined to use the archival material that has since become available to unravel the story of the organisation without losing sight of its inadequacies.
Autobiographies and Biographies
The publication of these early books and studies on exile was paralleled by a number of biographies and autobiographies of former émigrés