return to the ruins of war-ravaged Europe. However, their recoil from ‘paradise’ is only seemingly paradoxical.
In part they were tormented by their own incestuous choice. Adorno in Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (a journal he kept in Los Angeles during the war) recalled the ‘isolation [which] becomes worse through the formation of exclusive, politically controlled groups, suspicious of their members, hostile towards those branded as different. . . . Relations among outcasts are even more poisonous than among the residents.’67 (Adorno certainly knew what he was talking about; Brecht thought that the Los Angeles soirées of the Institute for Social Research (the ‘Frankfurt School’) resembled ‘graduate seminars in a wartime bunker’.)68 Segregated from native Angelenos, the exiles composed a miniature society in a self-imposed ghetto, clinging to their old-world prejudices like cultural life-preservers.
But their collective melancholia was also a reaction to the landscape. With few exceptions they complained bitterly about the absence of a European (or even Manhattan) civitas of public places, sophisticated crowds, historical auras and critical intellectuals. Amid so much open land there seemed to be no space that met their criteria of ‘civilized urbanity’. Los Angeles, for all its fleshpots and enchantments, was experienced as a cultural antithesis to nostalgic memories of pre-fascist Berlin or Vienna. Indeed, as the September song of exile wore on, Los Angeles became increasingly symbolized as an ‘anti-city’, a Gobi of suburbs.
The formation of a critical consensus about Los Angeles/Hollywood (the two hopelessly conflated in the minds of most exiles) was, moreover, a seminal moment in the European reconceptualization of the United States. What had been largely romance – European fantasies of cowboys, Lindbergh and skyscrapers – was now mediated through actual experience in a city that stood in the same quasi-utopian relationship to the rest of the United States as America as a whole had stood to the Weimar imagination of the 1920s. Put another way, exile in Southern California ultimately transformed the terms for understanding the impact of Modernism, at least in the minds of the intellectuals influenced by the Institute for Social Research, which had moved to Santa Monica at the beginning of the war.69
Adorno, who wrote the Dialectic of Enlightenment with Max Horkheimer in Los Angeles during the war, said after his return to Frankfurt years later, ‘It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that any contemporary consciousness that has not appropriated the American experience, even if in opposition, has something reactionary about it.’70 In Los Angeles where Adorno and Horkheimer accumulated their ‘data’, the exiles thought they were encountering America in its purest, most prefigurative moment. Largely ignorant of, or indifferent to, the peculiar historical dialectic that had shaped Southern California, they allowed their image of first sight to become its own myth: Los Angeles as the crystal ball of capitalism’s future. And, confronted with this future, they experienced all the more painfully the death agony of Enlightenment Europe.71
The Frankfurt critique of the ‘Culture Industry’ became the primary theoretical representation of this encounter. The focus of their time in Los Angeles being Hollywood, and its specular double ‘Hollywood!’, the Germans were soon adding a Hegelian polish to homegrown noir sensibility. They described the Culture Industry not merely as political economy, but as a specific spatiality that vitiated the classical proportions of European urbanity, expelling from the stage both the ‘masses’ (in their heroic, history-changing incarnation) and the critical intelligentsia. Exhibiting no apparent interest in the wartime turmoil in the local aircraft plants nor inclined to appreciate the vigorous nightlife of Los Angeles’s Central Avenue ghetto, Horkheimer and Adorno focused instead on the little single-family boxes that seemed to absorb the world-historic mission of the proletariat into family-centered consumerism under the direction of radio jingles and Life magazine ads. The sun rises over Mount Hollywood in Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous opening section of ‘The Culture Industry’:
Even now, the older houses just outside the concrete city center look like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures of world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans. Yet the city housing projects designed to perpetuate the individual as a supposedly independent unit in a small hygienic dwelling make him all the more subservient to his adversary – the absolute power of capitalism.72
Despite their heady discovery, however, Horkheimer and Adorno were scarcely the Columbus and Magellan of this brave new world. The Los Angeles landscape of movie studios and single-family homes was already being chronicled by curious European observers long before the Weimar diaspora arrived in force. In the late twenties, for example, the foremost muckraker of German-language journalism, Egon Erwin Kisch, had set his acerbic wit against Open Shop Los Angeles. Famous for his exposé of the Colonel Redl affair which shook the Hapsburg Empire on the eve of World War One, Kisch was a prominent member of the Austrian Communist Party by the time he arrived in Los Angeles. His ironic travelogue, Paradies Amerika, echoed Adamic in its savage satirization of make-believe land-scapes and speculative manias. Unimpressed with a city seemingly built only on sunshine, Kisch asked, ‘Will this immense real-estate business end as a boom, as a speculative maneuver followed by a crash?’73
A few years later, after the ‘crash’ – and as the 1932 Olympics riveted world attention on Los Angeles, the ‘mystery’ of its growth, and its excess of cults – the German geographer Anton Wagner, who had relatives in the old German colony at Anaheim, meticulously mapped, photographed and described the Los Angeles Basin. His Los Angeles . . . Zweimillionenstadt in Sudkalifornien (1935) was a monument to old-fashioned Teutonic scholarship; Reyner Banham praised it forty years later as ‘the only comprehensive view of Los Angeles as a built environment’.74 Although awash with garbled pseudo-scientisms and racial allusions, Los Angeles offered an extraordinarily detailed panorama of the city’s districts and environs in the early Depression. Wagner was particularly fascinated by the penetration of the principle of the movie set into the design of ‘façade landscapes’, particularly Hollywood’s elaborate, but doomed, attempt to generate a Europeanized ‘real urban milieu’:
Here, one wants to create the Paris of the Far West. Evening traffic on Hollywood Boulevard attempts to mimic Parisian boulevard life. However, life on the Boulevard is extinct before midnight, and the seats in front of the cafes, where in Paris one can watch street life in a leisurely manner, are missing. . . . At night the illuminated portraits of movie stars stare down from lampposts upon crowds dressed in fake European elegance – a declaration that America yearns to be something other than American here. . . . Yet, in spite of the artists, writers and aspiring film stars, the sensibility of a real Montmartre, Soho, or even Greenwich Village, cannot be felt here. The automobile mitigates against such a feeling, and so do the new houses. Hollywood lacks the patina of age.75
This notion of ‘counterfeit urbanity’, which, as we have seen, was already a cliché in the Menckenite critique of Los Angeles, would be further elaborated in the writing of the exiles (some of whom, presumably, were disembarking at San Pedro as Professor Wagner, maps in hand, was returning to his academic sinecure in the Third Reich). The contemporary ‘adventures in hyperreality’ of Eco and Baudrillard in Southern California, which have caused such a stir, strictly follow in these earlier footsteps. For example, in the German version of his Hollywood book, Shadows in Paradise, Erich Maria Remarque perfectly anticipated Eco and Baudrillard’s idea of the city as ‘simulacrum’:
Real and false were fused here so perfectly that they became a new substance, just as copper and zinc become brass that looks like gold. It meant nothing that Hollywood was filled with great musicians, poets and philosophers. It was also filled with spiritualists, religious nuts and swindlers. It devoured everyone, and whoever was unable to save himself in time, would lose his identity, whether he thought so himself or not.76
But for most exiles the perceived lifelessness of the city grew
