Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture (review)

Abstract

Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture, edited by Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 269 pp. $69.95. The essays contained in this volume share an unusual unity of interpretation for a collection of papers culled from an academic conference held at Washington University in 2001. They confront the general view that exiles from Hitler in the 1930s went from a cradle of community and creativity in Germany and Austria to a cauldron of consumerism and coldness in the United Minima Moralia (1951). In contrast, most of the contributors to this volume paint a more complex picture of the exilic experience, and to varying degrees they succeed. In the introduction, editors Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Kopenick acknowledge the frustration and alienation that comes with exile. But in following theorists of the exile experience, they find that it also opens up new possibilities of creativity as artists engage in new productive negotiations, ironic masquerades, symbolic mingling, performance hybridization, performative self-transformation, and cultural mingling. Although riddled with jargon and repetition, the introduction does hammer home the essential point: exile is a complex process. Many of the essays in this volume attempt to shed light on this process by looking at the specific work and experiences of various exiles. Readers of this journal, however, will search in vain for any sustained examination of issues of Jewish identity. Indeed, most of the figures analyzed in the volume are not Jewish. Edgar G. Ulmer and Peter Lorre are discussed in separate essays, but issues of their Jewish identity are, at best, peripheral to the main line of analysis. Moreover, with one exception, none of the essays distinguishes between voluntary emigration and forced exile. Nor do the essays consider whether Jewish exiles, for a host of reasons, might have brought different baggage with them to the United States than those who left for political reasons. In keeping with the shared interpretive framework of this volume, the essays demonstrate how various exiles were sometimes anguished and alienated, but also how they managed to navigate their new situations - sometimes to the point of thriving. One of the stronger essays by Iain Boyd White examines two architects, Jakob Detlef Peters (later to be known as Jock Peters), who voluntarily emigrated to the United States in 1922, and Karl Schneider, who fled to the United States in 1938 under political pressure. Both had already encountered, and to a degree embraced, certain stylistic and philosophical assumptions from Frank Lloyd Wright. In the United States, Peters worked on film design, but also took charge of the interior of Bullock's department store in Los Angeles, a commission that gave him an opportunity to realize his own vision, within a commercial milieu. Schneider, with the help of other exiles in the United States, was soon working after arrival for Sears Roebuck, applying some of his design ideas - with a certain Bauhaus impetus. …