Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism

by Erhard Bahr
University of California Press. 2007
358 pp., illus. 28 b/w. Hardcover, $42.00; paper, $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-520-25128-1; ISBN: 978-0-520-25795-5.

Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg

jonathanzilberg@gmail.com



Weimar on the Pacific is one of those rare books in which an entire career of eminent scholarship comes together in a book so interesting, so easy, and such a pleasure to read that one just cannot help oneself from staying up late into the night, thinking about it one day after another and yearning to talk about it with anyone you can find who adores and yet abhors Adorno, despises Baudrillard’s America for its reactive continental shallowness, and who has the remotest clue of what is 12 tone music and why it is important to modernism.

Bahr’s book is in great part a social history, which reveals amazing interconnections between philosophy and the arts and politics in the German exile community in Los Angeles in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Above all perhaps, one comes away with a highly imbricated sense of the generative and creative intersections between the German modernist’s works and their relation to the Weimar legacy and the Enlightenment. One also comes away with case after case study of an immense and arguably naïve antipathy on these modernists part to capitalism - an ever present fear of compromising authentic art by “selling out” to kitsch and the Hollywood dream machine, as equally any return to the old mythology of religion. But above all, besides those interested in the complexities of modernism per se, I do believe that it will be those who are interested in tensions concerning German intellectual history and The Jewish Question who will find this book of the most enduring value.

Depending on whether one’s interests lie in critical theory, music, literature, film or architecture, specifically in case studies of works respectively by Theodor Adorno and Arnold Schoenberg, Bertold Brecht, Alfred Doblin, Fritz Lang and Tomas Mann, Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, and Franz Werfel, one will find each chapter of rather different use value. Taken as a whole however, the great value of this study is the fluent ease in which Bahr conveys this history of the internal diversity of the arts so as to inform the study of exile modernism and its political and social dimensions. This is particularly the case as regards anti-Semitism and the Weimar legacy and the political role of art in times of extreme crisis as a medium for working out issues peculiar to modernism.

Of the many surprising things that one will learn here perhaps is the fact that so many of the most important writings of the Frankfurt School were produced while men such as Adorno were living in exile in Los Angeles. Moreover, as Bahr and Edward Said have presented it, it was the experience of either being exiled or immigrants that led to the most acute expressions and understanding of modernism and enlightenment as for instance in the discussion therein of Dialectics of Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkeheimer. Here Bahr provides us a very clear exegesis of the nature of the Frankfurt School and the centrality of dialectical theory. Through showing how the dialectic process is absent for instance in Werfel’s work he allows the non-philosophers amongst us to better understand issues in literature and philosophy that are usually far from transparent.

For myself, the most important chapters for the purpose of this review are the first two and last two chapters namely “The Dialectics of Modernism” and “Art and Resistance to Society: Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory” and finally “Evil Germany versus Good Germany: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus and “A ‘True Modernist’”: Arnold Schoenberg”. In addition, the appendices make a valuable addition in that they include the text of the Kol Nidre, the Jewish prayer of atonement for which Schoenberg wrote an intensely historically significant score. This, in addition to the chronology, the inclusion of Schoenberg’s text A Survivor of Warsaw and the thoughtful and elegant discussions on them by Bahr makes this book acutely significant for Jewish Studies and will give it a special place in studies of exile culture, holocaust literature and musicology. The final discussion of Schoenberg’s commission for Kol Nidre, particularly his explanation of recanting oaths and repentance in the historical context of the Spanish Inquisition though well known, makes for particularly insightful reading as regards music composition and references in such music which one might otherwise be unaware of.

For those in literary studies, Bahr provides a powerful exegesis of the differences and tensions within the works and politics of the German exile writers and thus of exile modernism itself. It is very much built upon a sustained consideration of Brecht’s California poetry in Chapter Thee and his Galileo in Chapter Four. This sustained comparative insight is furthered in the next chapter on epic theater versus film noir in which he contrasts Fritz Lang’s work to Brecht’s. Ever synthetic, after a consideration of architecture as immigrant modernism, the sophisticated plural analysis of different forms of modernism increasingly comes into its own. There Bahr begins with the difference between modernism and anti-modernism by focusing on Franz Werfel’s anti-modernism and his connected traitorous conversion to Catholicism, then proceeds to the renegade modernism of Alfred Doblin and two chapters later, the “true” modernism of Schoenberg. In deftly moving from Brecht to Lang, and then from Werfel to Doblin to Schoenberg, there are the all important chapters on the conflicting political positions within German exile modernism specifically as related to the failure of The Council for a Democratic Germany. All this builds up to inform the penultimate complexity of his discussion of the modernist portrayal of good versus evil in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus.

For those teaching both graduate and undergraduate classes about Critical Theory and the Frankfurt School there are perhaps few other books as useful as this for laying a sound and engaging base for introducing the difficult readings that characterize the larger tradition of critical theory. Certainly, Chapter Two on Adorno is essential reading for any students of aesthetics and music who are struggling with Robert Hullot-Kentor’s newly translated and edited study Theodore W. Adorno. Philosophy of New Music (2006). And for those in literary studies, besides the many contributions Bahr makes to an always lucid analysis of modernism and exile cultures, after reading his book, one will never read Herbert Mann’s Dr. Faustus in the same way again. Indeed, the revelations as to how and to what extent Mann drew on Adorno and Schoenberg’s work are so revealing that I cannot imagine English Literature and music students not reading this book and the original works by Mann and Adorno in parallel so as to examine how artists draw upon and respond to other’s work. In doing so they will better understand how deeply inter-twined the arts and humanities are. The book is replete with other similarly valuable examples of the predatory intellectual work involved in the creative production of original works of “authentic” modern art.

In essence, in its manifestly rich intersections regarding film, literature and music, and their historical contexts and references, Weimar on the Pacific is of enormous value to the inter-disciplinary project. My suspicion is that any graduate student who reads this book, or any intellectual who reads it for that matter, will be impelled to return to Doctor Faustus and classic Hollywood films such as Dr Strangelove and think all over again about politics and history, and art and authenticity. There they might find that there is not so much distance between Adorno and Darth Vadar, at least as Thomas Mann would have it, and particularly as far as jazz is concerned. In this, it is fascinating to contrast all this to Terry Eagleton’s simplistic comments on this “bizarre” Hollywood saga and his unsubstantiated rebuttal of Adorno’s critics in his review “Determinacy Kills” in The London Review of Books of Detlev Claussen’s book Theodor Adorno: One Last Genius which complements Bahr’s in many respects (see http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n12/eagl01.html). All this may be of considerable interest perhaps to musicologists and philosophers as if there is one fundamental feature which characterizes Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music in contrast to his other work it is its extreme determinism. No doubt, a debate over Adorno is in the making for Leonardo as for instance already advanced with Sean Cubitt’s review of Michael Chanan’s From Handel to Hendrix (1999), David Beer’s review of Tia De Nora’s After Adorno (2003) and Mike Mosher’s review of David Jenemann’s Adorno in America (2007).

All in all, when one considers the insights one will get into the history of Hollywood and American and German intellectual history during the 1930’s and 1940’s and the incessant tension between elitist and populist notions of high and low culture, this is a truly fascinating book that underscores the centrality and enduring value of the Weimarian ideal of the role of the arts, politics and philosophy in “civilized” society compromised by the history of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides. Bahr astutely advances Adorno’s notion of art as resistance and of the integration of modern music into the historical process and details how paradox, ambiguity and the avoidance of closure became the litmus tests for exile modernism. In doing so, Weimar on the Pacific brings a keen sense of theoretical awareness to any understanding of the crisis of modernism in exile literature and music.