The folks at Eichborn Verlag continue their excellent work with a new German edition of Salka Viertel's 1969 memoir The Kindness of Strangers (see my review here): Das unbelehrbare Herz new German translation by Helmut Degner. The book includes a Nachwort by Michael Lentz, author of the billiant novel on the German exile community in Los Angeles Pazifik Exil (see my review here).
The timing of this new release is good since there is renewed interest in German exile literature - as evidenced by Lentz's novel and the recent offering of Christa Wolf (Stadt der Engel: oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud).
Salka Viertel was a screenwriter, but her real genius was in friendship. She became close friends with every talent from Europe who sought refuge and livelihood in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s - from Garbo to Brecht to Huxley. She knew and helped them all. Her legenday Sunday gatherings at her home in Santa Monica were perhaps the greatest cluster of artistic genius since Mme de Staël's salon of the 1790s. But her friends gradually abandoned her and her adopted country - America - drove her back to Europe during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s.
One friend who never forgot her was Christopher Isherwood, whose diaries of the 1960s were just published. Salka Viertel gave Isherwood and his partner refuge in an apartment over her garage in the 1940s when they arrived on the west coast nearly penniless (Isherwood would write a Schlüsselroman about Salka's husband Bertold Viertel - Prater Violet (1945)). By 1960 Isherwood was an established fixture in the Hollywood scene and Salka Viertel had been hounded out of the US, but Isherwood paid tribute to his friend and mentor in an interview with London Magazine:
In many ways the fact that I’m sitting in this room is due to the Viertels. They used to live in a house just down here at the bottom of Santa Monica Canyon, and when I came to America one of my objectives was to meet his wife, Mrs Salka Viertel, which I then did, and we became great friends. So I settled in the Canyon here, and on and off, with interruptions, for the last twenty years I’ve lived in different houses in this area, most of them visible from this window.
Salka Viertel had a tremendous salon, all kinds of people came to the house. Thomas Mann came constantly; he lived just across on the other side of the hill, and, of course, Chaplin was there a great deal and Heinrich Mann and Schönberg and all sorts of people who were around in this area.
"All sorts of people who were around in this area." If they had talent, Salka Viertel knew them, befriended them, and introduced them to her other friends. And she writes about them as friends - not in a boastful, name-dropping way - in The Kindness of Strangers. It is time for this book to be reissued in its original English.
Such a fascinating time in the U.S. Wouldn't it have been grand to be there, if you had no memory of Europe and did not feel like an exile.
Posted by: Hattie | December 27, 2010 at 08:03 PM