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

Abstract

Ehrhard Bahr, on Pacific: German Exile Culture Los and Crisis of Modernism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007. 358 pp. Newly arrived from Europe 1939,Thomas Mann finished his novel Lotte with words addressed to celebrity: Good god, Frau Hoff atin, I must say: To help Werther's Lotte out of Goethe's carriage, that is an event- what can I say? It must be written down.Two years later, The New Yorker titled society reporter Janet Flanner's article about Thomas Mann California Goethe Hollywood. (Mann responded that every-other fact was false.) And with that real and fictional journey through time and space from Goethe's eighteenth-century to Republic's Magic Mountain and from there to Hollywood's mythical shores was completed. Ih this forty-first volume of distinguished series Weimar Now: German Cultural Criticism, Ehrhard Bahr ranges from theory of Adorno and Horkheimer to Brecht's California work, from architecture of pre-exile Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler to works by Werfel and Doblin, and from Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus to Schoenberg's late work.The book elicits some of interdisciplinary pleasures apt to emerge from look at topic like this; but because it is more set of loosely connected essays than promised treatise on LA and modernism, it can be frustrating as well. Bahr writes that his book is unique among studies of German-speaking exiles LA because the crisis of modernism . . . found specific German answer Los Angeles (9)· He cites Raymond Williams on modernism as response to new media and border crossings (9). He uses Russell Berman's book The Rise of Modern German Novel to think passing about fascist modernism, leftist modernism, and modernism of social individuality (1 1 - 1 2). In book's first chapter he catalogues some of arguments Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment and mentions Jameson's A Singular Modernity to talk about modernist defamiliarization (39-40). He writes about Brecht's California poetry as a prime example of modernist poetics exile (104), but, oddly, does so Bettina Englmann's postmodern context which Brecht's of realist literature was demand for deconstruction (104). He cites Ruth Kluger to effect that modernism involves 'in theme, sense of doom and isolation, form, highly complex structure and style that is not easily penetrable' (190). And repeatedly he seems to sum up modernity simply as movement whose art closure is denied (21). Each of works Bahr describes some detail - and number of novels and plays and buildings and musical compositions produced by these artists is impressive indeed - is briefly measured against this hodgepodge standard of modernism and/or against ideas from Adorno and Horkheimer. For instance, Werfel's work, in contrast to Adorno 's concept of literature and art ... is devoid of any dialectic . . . and is 'regress to mythology' (186). Dublin's novel is 'regress to mythology' (222). …