Earlier I wrote about the German exile community in New York City. The heart of the intellectual exile community during the 1930s and 1940s, however, was on the west coast, in and around Hollywood. An indispensible book on the period is Salka Viertel's The Kindness of Strangers (1969). The book has been out of print for decades, but I managed to find a copy in a library in northern Maine. A German translation -- Das unbelehrbare Herz --- was published in 1982 and can be found in antiquariat book stores. The book should be reissued, this time with an index of names, since it is a valuable historical document, and Salka Viertel was a pivotal figure in German exile literature.
The book can be divided roughly into two sections. The first half deals with her childhood in Poland and her early career as a stage actress in Vienna and Berlin. The recollections of the theater life during the difficult years after World War One are fascinating. Salka worked for the director Max Reinhardt, and she has interesting anecdotes about her first encounters with the famous man. In Vienna she meets one of the two great loves of her life, Berthold Viertel ( the other was Greta Garbo). Berthold Viertel was a protégé of the Austrian writer and iconoclast Karl Kraus, and we see Kraus at the height of his power in Vienna and Berlin. Through Kraus, Salka encounters the greatest artists of time, and she provides some tantalizing glimpses of Franz Kafka ("how healthy and tan he seemed") and Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1928 Berthold Viertel is offered the opportunity to work with the German film director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau at the Fox Studios in Hollywood, and that is where the real story of The Kindness of Strangers begins.
Life was not easy in California for Salka. Berthold was unfortunately a self-proclaimed genius of the old school, and so couldn't be bothered with the details of daily existence, such as making money for rent, raising children, keeping a household, etc. These tasks fell to Salka alone. While raising three sons essentially by herself, she found work as a scriptwriter for MGM studios and made (barely) enough money to buy her dream house on the ocean - 165 Mabery Road in Santa Monica. This modest bungalow would later become the most important salon for German and Austrian émigres.
Salka Viertel had a generous heart; her first instinct was to help people, but for the most part she reaped only sorrow. Berthold would leave her; Garbo would take liberties with her friendship for the rest of her life, her adopted country would betray her; hence the German title Das unbelehrbare Herz (The Incorrigible Heart). When Germany and then Austria fell to the Nazis, Salka did everything in her power to help people come to America, and, if possible, find work at the Hollywood studios. She was the force behind the European Film Fund, Hollywood's only endeavor to rescue Jewish and left-wing artists. In one sad episode, Salka was able to find work for the great composer Arnold Schoenberg writing music for a Hollywood "B" movie. Heinrich Mann, Alfred Döblin, and Leonhard Frank were among the many beneficiaries. Aldous Huxley was Salka's "friend" and with his wife spent many days and nights enjoying her hospitality at 165 Mabery Road, as did Thomas and Katja Mann. She rented out her garage apartment to Christopher Isherwood and his male lover, since they couldn't afford anything else. There is a marvelous description of Heinrich Mann's seventieth birthday dinner hosted by Salka at her home, with Heinrich and Thomas giving interminable tributes to each other. She collaborated with Bertolt Brecht on a screenplay which was rejected by the studios.
Salka Viertel appears nowhere in Huxley's memoirs or Thomas Mann's journals. They depended on her, she helped them survive in a strange and hostile environment, but she wasn't worthy of acknowledgement. Only Isherwood pays a warm tribute to Salka in his memoirs.
Salka would have been happy spending the rest of her life on Mabery Road, looking out into the blue Pacific. But it was not meant to be. Because of her generosity to certain "undesirables", such as the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein or the left-wing composer Hanns Eisler, Salka was "blacklisted" in Hollywood during the McCarthy era and could no longer find work. The US State Department suspected her of being a communist and she was denied a US passport, even though she had become a US citizen. She took advantage of a temporary passport to flee to Switzerland, where she joined her son Peter and her grandchild.
Salka is forgotten today. Biographies have been written about her "genius" husband Berthold, but Salka appears only as footnote in works about Greta Garbo. She deserves better, and her extraordinary story should to be read today by anyone interested in the German exile experience.
vermutlich ist sie eine von sehr, sehr vielen starken, großherzigen frauen, die im vergessen der geschichte verschwunden sind ... die geschichte sah und sieht noch immer lieber auf die männer im vordergrund.
Posted by: erphschwester | February 01, 2007 at 12:42 AM
Die Frau ist das staerkere Wesen.
I learned that Salka's Nachlass was acquired by the Deutsches Litaturarchiv in Marbach and includes 12 boxes of personal letters (from Garbo and many others). Great material for a biography...
Posted by: David | February 01, 2007 at 08:42 AM
Just for the record:
many issues of Karl Kraus' "Die Fackel" are now available online at the Austrian Academy Corpus.
http://corpus1.aac.ac.at/fackel/
Registration is free and easy!
Posted by: Jochen | February 01, 2007 at 10:06 AM
Remarkable stuff David. You've been digging up some real gems re. German exiles in America.
Posted by: scott | February 07, 2007 at 03:53 PM