he could not enjoy himself during his customary morning walk. ‘Empty sidewalks, streets and houses’ were too redolent of the ‘desert’ from which Los Angeles originally had been conjured.77 For his part, Hanns Eisler denounced the ‘dreadful idyll of this landscape, that actually has sprung from the mind of real-estate speculation because the landscape does not offer much by itself. If one stopped the flow of water here for three days, the jackals would reappear and the sand of the desert’.78
Yet not all Europeans were estranged by either the facade or the desert behind it. Aldous Huxley – part of a ‘Bloomsbury’ set of expatriate British pacifists that included Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Heard, and, briefly, Lord Russell (at UCLA) – relished precisely those qualities of the local landscape that the Germans most despised. In a headlong escape from both war and Hollywood, Huxley moved his family to a ranch in the desert near the ruins of the original ‘anti-Los Angeles’ of Llano del Rio.79 Here, while he searched for the ‘godhead’ in the silence of the Mojave, his wife Maria devoured the astrology columns in the Times that Adorno made fun of. Huxley and Heard, embracing mysticism, health-food and hallucinogens, would later in the 1950s become the godfathers of Southern California’s ‘New Age’ subculture.80
It would be amusing to know if Huxley and Brecht ever discussed the weather. None of the anti-fascist exiles seemed more spiritually desolated by Los Angeles than the Berlin playwright and Marxist aesthetician. As he put it in a famous poem:
On thinking about Hell, I gather
My brother Shelley found it was a place
Much like the city of London. I
Who live in Los Angeles and not in London
Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be
Still more like Los Angeles.81
Yet Brecht’s desperate ennui was compounded out of strange contradictions. One moment he was complaining that his Santa Monica bungalow was ‘too pleasant to work in’, the next he was promoting Los Angeles as a ‘hell’ of Shelleyan proportions. It borders on the absurd, as Lyon and Fuegi point out, ‘to imagine an original European like Brecht shopping in an American supermarket, or passing the California driver’s test, or in a drugstore picking up canned beer and running into Arnold Schoenberg’.82 (Huxley, by contrast, first opened the ‘doors of perception’ with mescaline in the ‘world’s biggest drugstore’ on La Cienega.)83 By the same token, however, it is odd that the creator of Mahagonny, who in Berlin favoured lumpen demimondaines and working-class conversation, should have shown so little apparent interest in exploring Los Angeles’s alternative side: Boyle Heights dancehalls, Central Avenue nightclubs, Wilmington honky-tonks, and so on. Real-life Mahagonny was always to hand, as was a thriving local labor movement, largely led from the left. But if the ‘stench of oil’ occasionally penetrated his garden in Santa Monica, Brecht fabricated the myth of the convergence of heaven and hell without really knowing what the ‘hellish’ parts of Los Angeles looked like.84
Not all the Germans, of course, spent their time in Los Angeles in existential despair. Thomas Mann (according to Brecht) pictured himself in the Pacific Palisades as a ‘latter-day Goethe in search of the land where the lemons grow’.85 Schoenberg may have resented Shirley Temple, but he loved playing tennis with his other Brentwood neighbor, George Gershwin, as well as the sunlight that flooded his study each morning while he composed.86 Max Reinhart, for his part, boasted that Southern California would become ‘a new center of culture. . . . there is no more hospitable landscape’.87 Indeed for a while the more famous of the exiles could fancy themselves Hollywood sahibs: happy white people under the palm trees, feeding themselves on an economy run by invisible servants. But even the most suntanned of the exiles, including Mann and Reinhardt, woke up to the fact that behind the Mediterraneanized affluence lurked exploitation and militarism.
In the first place, virtually all the Europeans railed against Hollywood’s proletarianization of the intelligentsia. Here the complaints of the Weimar and Bloomsbury groups echoed the already alienated writers’ colony (the Screen Writers Guild had been formed in 1933), and retraced a theme, as I have argued, that was central to Los Angeles fiction. Thrown into a ‘totally alien, opaque environment, where creative ideas, artistry and originality did not count, where everything was tuned to the ways one finds in workshops and offices’,88 the exiles experienced artistic degradation amid affluence. Despite his initial euphoria about the cultural prospects of Southern California, Max Reinhardt found himself expected to punch a studio timeclock like any factory worker – ‘in 1942 he left dejectedly for New York City’. Brilliant, anti-fascist actors of the Weimar theater like Fritz Kortner, Alexander Grenach, and Peter Lorre were restricted by studio bosses to ridiculous impersonations of the Nazi leadership.89 Stravinsky’s big break was rearranging the Rite of Spring as a soundtrack for dancing brooms in Disney’s Fantasia, while Schoenberg, otherwise invisible, tutored studio composers who made musical suspense for noir thrillers and monster movies.90 Marxists, who earlier in Germany had praised the advent of collectivized intellectual production and the disappearance of the author, now bitterly denounced Taylorized ‘breadwork’, as Brecht called it, and the futility of ‘writing for nobody’.91 For Adorno, Hollywood was nothing less than the mechanized cataclysm that was abolishing Culture in the classical sense. (‘In America, one will . . . not be able to dodge the question, whether the term culture, in which one grew up, has become obsolete. . . .’)92
Secondly, whatever their material situation, secluded (Adorno) or integrated (Billy Wilder), forgotten (Heinrich Mann and Man Ray) or celebrated (Thomas Mann), dependent on charity (Döblin) or housed in the Palisades (Feuchtwanger), the exiles were all vulnerable to changes in the political climate. Concentrated in the movie colony under an increasingly hostile public eye, they played out their final role in Los Angeles as scape-goats of the Hollywood Inquisition. With the entire industry increasingly held hostage by cold war brainwashing, and ten of their American colleagues on the road to prison (with hundreds more blacklisted for a generation), many of the exiles chose to take the first boat back to the Old World. Others hung on, as best they could, writing or directing the occasional noir film that intimated the cancer of political and cultural repression.
Later, back in Modell Deutschland (which he had chosen over Brecht’s DDR), Horkheimer reorganized the Frankfurt School and began to publish the rest of his and Adorno’s notes from the mid twentieth century’s ‘most advanced point of observation’. The Frankfurters briefed the new European intelligentsia about the coming order for which the Marshall Plan was laying the foundation. Bittersweet memories of ‘exile in paradise’ (New York and Los Angeles) were sublimated into a preemptive critique of cultural Americanization and the consumer society. Southern California, mean-while, might have forgotten that it had ever housed the Institute for Social Research, except for the unexpected arrival of Frankfurt’s most famous prodigal son, Herbert Marcuse, in the early 1960s – the last of the exile generation to arrive on the West Coast.
Recruited from Brandeis to anchor the philosophy program at the spectacular new sea-cliff campus of the University of California at San Diego, Marcuse willingly walked back into the same storm of rabid anti-radicalism and anti-intellectualism from which Brecht, Eisler and scores of others had fled in the late 1940s. During what Barry Katz has called his ’years of cheerful pessimism’, Marcuse took Adorno’s ‘collapse of culture’ thesis a step further, positing a ‘democratic totalitarianism’ undermining the very possibility of critical subjectivity. Undoubtedly he found plentiful confirmation for this claim in surrounding San Diego County, with its eerie landscape conjugation of seaside resorts and Marine Corps bases.
But even in this ‘one-dimensional society’, Marcuse welcomed emergent ‘forces of liberation’: praising soul music and jazz (which Adorno excoriated), supporting Angela Davis
