1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910809271703321

Autore

Bahr Ehrhard

Titolo

Weimar on the Pacific : German exile culture in Los Angeles and the crisis of modernism / / Ehrhard Bahr

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, : University of California Press, c2007

ISBN

1-282-35926-6

9786612359262

0-520-93380-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xvii, 358 pages) : illustrations

Collana

Weimar and now : German cultural criticism ; ; 41

Disciplina

700.89/31079494

Soggetti

Modernism (Aesthetics) - California - Los Angeles

Germans - California - Los Angeles - Intellectual life

Jews, German - California - Los Angeles - Intellectual life

Los Angeles (Calif.) Intellectual life 20th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 323-346) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Abbreviations -- Preface -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. The Dialectic of Modernism -- Chapter 2. Art and Its Resistance to Society -- Chapter 3. Bertolt Brecht's California Poetry -- Chapter 4. The Dialectic of Modern Science -- Chapter 5. Epic Theater versus Film Noir -- Chapter 6. California Modern as Immigrant Modernism -- Chapter 7. Between Modernism and Antimodernism -- Chapter 8. Renegade Modernism -- Chapter 9. The Political Battleground of Exile Modernism -- Chapter 10. Evil Germany versus Good Germany -- Chapter 11. A "True Modernist" -- Conclusion: The Weimar Legacy of Los Angeles -- Chronology -- Appendices -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

In the 1930's and 40's, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals-including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg-who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism. Weimar Germany and its culture, with its meld of eighteenth-



century German classicism and twentieth-century modernism, served as a touchstone for this group of diverse talents and opinions. Weimar on the Pacific is the first book to examine these artists and intellectuals as a group. Ehrhard Bahr studies selected works of Adorno, Horkheimer, Brecht, Lang, Neutra, Schindler, Döblin, Mann, and Schoenberg, weighing Los Angeles's influence on them and their impact on German modernism. Touching on such examples as film noir and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, Bahr shows how this community of exiles reconstituted modernism in the face of the traumatic political and historical changes they were living through.