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

Product Information

The Seventh Army’s OSS Detachment Headquarters was located in a turreted chateau near Lyon, France. The elegant mansion contained an ornate interior with mirrored walls and period furniture. Other sections of the detachment were billeted in hunting lodges, villas, and convents throughout the remote mountains near Stasbourg. After her divorce in 1947, Salka lived in Brentwood, Southern California. In 1953, she left the U.S. and settled in Klosters in Switzerland, where later, her son Peter and his second wife, actress Deborah Kerr, [2] lived.

The narrator of “Doctor Faustus” is a humanist scholar named Serenus Zeitblom. With a high-bourgeois mien and a digressive prose style, Zeitblom is unmistakably an exercise in authorial self-parody, and he begins writing his memoir of Leverkühn in May, 1943, on the same day that Mann himself set to work on the novel. But Zeitblom is not in Los Angeles. Rather, he belongs to the so-called inner emigration—the cohort of German intellectuals who professed to oppose Nazism from within the country. Mann rejected the concept of inner emigration when it surfaced after the war, and Zeitblom, with his ineffectual reservations about the regime, stands in for such compromised figures as the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann and the poet Gottfried Benn. Viertel, Salka (1969). The Kindness of Strangers (1sted.). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN 9780030764707. OCLC 1088134575 . Retrieved 7 July 2022. In October 1923, the "use of the Italian language became mandatory on all levels of federal, provincial and local government". [5] Regulations by the fascist authorities required that all kinds of signs and public notices had to be in Italian only, while maps, postcards and other graphic material had to show Italian place names. [5] In September 1925, Italian became the sole permissible language in courts of law, meaning that, from then on, cases could be heard only in Italian. [5] The fascist law regulations remained in effect after World War II, becoming a bone of contention for decades until they were eventually reconsidered in the 1990s. [5] Añó, Núria. (2020) The Salon of Exiled Artists in California: Salka Viertel took in actors, prominent intellectuals and anonymous people in exile fleeing from Nazism, ISBN 9780463206126, ISBN 9798647624079, Los Gatos: Smashwords. Extensive programs for new rail junctions to facilitate the Italianization of Alto Adige (rail projects Milan-Mals, Veltlin-Brenner, Agordo-Brixen).

To continue reading, we just need a few details...

She learned English (her eighth language) and how to drive. Before long, she brought her sons to California, setting up household in a Tudor-style cottage on Mabery near the ocean in Santa Monica. It was there that she nested, art-directing her stage where she enjoyed her longest-running role as a salonniere, hosting guests on Sunday afternoons, introducing European intelligentsia to Hollywood power — and vice-versa. Saunders, Thomas J. (1994). Hollywood in Berlin: American Cinema and Weimar Germany. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp.197–98. ISBN 0-520-08354-7. Rifkind regularly takes issue with previous cultural historians who have denigrated Salka’s importance as a screenwriter…Rifkind writes engagingly and often passionately…[Salka’s] had been a remarkable life and she had been blessed with extraordinary friends, as Donna Rifkind again shows us.”— Washington Post Several castles of the aristocracy like the Rosenburg, Rastenberg, Rapottenstein, Heidenreichstein und rich monasteries like Zwettl, Altenburg and Geras stamp the character of the harsh, highly romantic landscape. Hollywood was created by its “others”; that is, by women, Jews, and immigrants. Salka Viertel was all three and so much more. She was the screenwriter for five of Greta Garbo's movies and also her most intimate friend. At one point during the Irving Thalberg years, Viertel was the highest-paid writer on the MGM lot. Meanwhile, at her house in Santa Monica she opened her door on Sunday afternoons to scores of European émigrés who had fled from Hitler—such as Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Arnold Schoenberg—along with every kind of Hollywood star, from Charlie Chaplin to Shelley Winters. In Viertel's living room (the only one in town with comfortable armchairs, said one Hollywood insider), countless cinematic, theatrical, and musical partnerships were born.

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 Awareness Salka Viertel has been more or less forgotten in America because too few people believed that what she accomplished was important. To survive and flourish in the hostile environment of the Hollywood studio system; to use her influence at the studios to petition for sponsors, affidavits, and jobs for refugees; to turn her home into the endpoint of a transatlantic routing network for those refugees, providing welcome, food, shelter, camaraderie, and introductions to potential employers; In the 1949 novel Call It Treason, written by OSS operative George Howe, the philosophical issues were explored through the character of a young German corporal, the son of a Berlin doctor who volunteered to reenter his homeland as an OSS agent. Howe posed the question, “Why does a spy risk his life? For what compulsion, and for what torment in his life? The gunpoint never forced a man to loyalty, and still less to treason, whose rewards at best are slim and distant. If the spy wins he is ignored, if he loses, he is hanged.”Learn about the economic and political crises facing Germany's Weimar Republic after World War I. (more) See all videos for this article 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.

She ends with a vivid portrait of two utterly contrasting writers both of whom found themselves in London in the late autumn of 1934: the elegant, uptight Stefan Zweig and the self-consciously rebellious Bertolt Brecht. 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. Worse than the insults, in my mind, is the neglect. While biographical information may be scarce about, say, Charlotte Dieterle, or such women as Miriam Davenport and Mildred Adams, who worked with Varian Fry at the Emergency Rescue Committee, this excuse does not apply to Salka Viertel, who in 1969 published one of the earliest and, it turns out, the most comprehensive personal record of Hollywood’s affiliation with Europe before and during the time of Hitler’s rise. The Kindness of Strangers has thus been eagerly plumbed again and again by scholars and researchers for its anecdotes about such luminaries as Greta Garbo, Arnold Schoenberg, and Albert Einstein, all the while studiously ignoring the woman who participated in and then chronicled those very anecdotes. a b c Rifkind, Donna (2020). The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood. New York: Other Press. ISBN 9781590517215. OCLC 1255775938. The best biographies tell the story not only of the individual but of the entire milieu in which they lived. Donna Rifkind does exactly this in her examination of Salka Viertel, a figure mostly unknown to the general public but whose life is a winding line from prewar Vienna to the coast of California at the dawn of Hollywood. This book is smart, questioning, insightful, and ultimately impossible to put down.”—Christian Kiefer, author of Phantoms: A NovelThe book has a broadly chronological structure as Santini recounts a small, carefully selected number of revealing case studies.

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. Oft-cited in the margins of Hollywood memoirs by Charlie Chaplin and S. N. Behrman and in the footnotes of Garbo and Mann biographies, Viertel (1889—1978) was a combination screenwriter, studio whisperer, benefactress, connector, life coach and lay rabbi.Though well aware of Salka’s salons and screenplays, I had neither knowledge of the depth and breadth of her beneficence, nor the impact of her mitzvahs. And since I hadn’t read her self-effacing memoir, “The Kindness of Strangers” — I have now, and she claims very little credit for her achievement — I had no idea of how radically her life and resources ebbed after World War II. 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. As she was preparing to board the plane, she stunned Viertel with the revelation that she was pregnant by her Gestapo lover. The exasperated OSS Marine demanded an explanation. The timing of this report was terrible. A great deal of effort and money had been invested into the mission. Maria reassured Viertel that she was ready and able to execute the mission but wanted OSS help in obtaining an abortion when she returned. Viertel agreed to her request. She returned two weeks later with exceptional intelligence information on the specific location of a German Army headquarters, troop deployments, and staging areas. Her highly successful mission was rewarded with the abortion, but only after persuading a reluctant French doctor that Maria was patriotic and a war casualty of sorts. Salka used her stage skills to act out possible plot turns in story meetings. “One of Thalberg’s favored Scheherazades” is how Rifkind describes her. The newly-minted screenwriter worked on many other scripts for the so-called “Swedish Sphinx,” including “The Painted Veil” (1934), “Anna Karenina” (1935) and “Conquest” (1937), and the original screenplay for “Madame Curie” that Garbo turned down and was reworked for Greer Garson. Die Häuser befinden sich in einem Viertel der kleinen Stadt Specchiolla in der Provinz Brindisi. Sie stammen aber nicht etwa aus der Zeit des Dritten Reichs, sondern wurden erst in den 1990er-Jahren gebaut.