As she was preparing to board the plane, she stunned Viertel with the revelation that she was pregnant by her Gestapo lover. The exasperated OSS Marine demanded an explanation. The timing of this report was terrible. A great deal of effort and money had been invested into the mission. Maria reassured Viertel that she was ready and able to execute the mission but wanted OSS help in obtaining an abortion when she returned. Viertel agreed to her request. She returned two weeks later with exceptional intelligence information on the specific location of a German Army headquarters, troop deployments, and staging areas. Her highly successful mission was rewarded with the abortion, but only after persuading a reluctant French doctor that Maria was patriotic and a war casualty of sorts. The German-language press, which was still published, was harassed by the authorities and subjected to censorship prior to publication. [6] In 1926 the fascist authorities began to publish their own German-language newspaper, the Alpenzeitung. [6] Other German-language papers were obliged to follow a strictly pro-regime editorial policy. [6] In 1923, three years after South Tyrol had been formally annexed, Italian place names, almost entirely based on the Prontuario dei nomi locali dell'Alto Adige, were made official by means of a decree. [2] The German name "Tyrol" was banned, likewise its derivants and compound words such as "Tyrolean" and "South Tyrolean". [2] German newspapers, publishing houses, organized clubs and associations, including the South Tyrolean Alpine Club had to be renamed, with the decree said to have been strictly enforced by Italian carabinieri on the ground. [2] The basis for these actions was a manifesto published by Ettore Tolomei on 15 July 1923, called the Provvedimenti per l'Alto Adige ("Measures for the Alto Adige"), becoming the blueprint for the Italianization campaign. [3] Its 32 measures were: [4] After 1933, the exiles had to come to grips with a world that surpassed their most extravagant nightmares. One popular stratagem was to insert contemporary allegories into historical fiction, which was enjoying an extended vogue. Heinrich Mann produced a hefty pair of novels dramatizing the life of King Henry IV of France. A gruesome description of the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre makes one think of pogroms in Nazi Germany, and the leaders of the Catholic League radiate Fascist ruthlessness. Döblin, by contrast, immersed himself in recent history, undertaking a novel cycle titled “November 1918.” It examines the German Revolution of 1918-19, with the Communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht featured as principal characters. Döblin seems almost to be reliving the Revolution and its aftermath, in the hope that it will have a better outcome.

The book has a broadly chronological structure as Santini recounts a small, carefully selected number of revealing case studies. Many were Jewish, though their Jewishness was often of secondary significance (Ernst Gombrich, later director of the Warburg Institute, said that whether a historian or philosopher happened to be Jewish was more the domain of Hitler or Goebbels).In the 1949 novel Call It Treason, written by OSS operative George Howe, the philosophical issues were explored through the character of a young German corporal, the son of a Berlin doctor who volunteered to reenter his homeland as an OSS agent. Howe posed the question, “Why does a spy risk his life? For what compulsion, and for what torment in his life? The gunpoint never forced a man to loyalty, and still less to treason, whose rewards at best are slim and distant. If the spy wins he is ignored, if he loses, he is hanged.”

Mann’s words also caused a flap among the émigrés. Brecht and Döblin both criticized their colleague for condemning ordinary Germans alongside Nazi élites. Brecht went so far as to write a poem titled “When the Nobel Prize Winner Thomas Mann Granted the Americans and English the Right to Chastise the German People for Ten Long Years for the Crimes of the Hitler Regime.” In fact, Mann disapproved of punitive measures, but his nuances were overlooked. As Hans Rudolf Vaget has shown, in his comprehensive 2011 study, “Thomas Mann, der Amerikaner,” the fallout from “Germany and the Germans” clouded Mann’s reputation for a generation. Only after several decades did the wisdom of his approach become clear, as Germany established a model for how a nation can work through its past—a process that is ongoing. Mann’s cross-examination of the German soul had a fictional component. In 1947, he published the novel “Doctor Faustus,” in which a modernist German composer makes a pact with the Devil—or, at least, hallucinates himself doing so. In great part, it is a retelling of the life of Friedrich Nietzsche, of his plunge from rarefied intellectual heights into megalomania and madness. It is also Mann’s most sustained exploration of the realm of music, which, to him, had always seemed seductive and dangerous in equal measure. The shadow of Wagner hangs over the book, even if Adrian Leverkühn, the character at its center, is anti-Wagnerian in orientation, his works mixing atonality, neoclassicism, ironic neo-Romanticism, and the unfulfilled compositional fantasies of Adorno, who assisted Mann in writing the musical descriptions.Though well aware of Salka’s salons and screenplays, I had neither knowledge of the depth and breadth of her beneficence, nor the impact of her mitzvahs. And since I hadn’t read her self-effacing memoir, “The Kindness of Strangers” — I have now, and she claims very little credit for her achievement — I had no idea of how radically her life and resources ebbed after World War II. Santini writes of the photographer Wolf Suschitzsky who left Vienna in 1934 for London where his sister, fellow photographer and political activist Edith Tudor-Hart had moved the previous year, and of Stefan Lorant, co-founder of Picture Post, and another recent arrival, the photographer Bill Brandt. Nevertheless, Salka’s three sons managed to have successful lives. Hans became a linguistics scholar at MIT. Thomas worked at the Los Angeles Department for Social Services. Peter (who was my friend and introduced me to the bullfighters who knew Hemingway) graduated from Dartmouth in 1941. He served as a marine in the Allied landings in the Solomon Islands, won a Silver Star, and, as a spymaster with the OSS, parachuted anti-Nazis into wartime Germany. The beautiful Jigee Schulberg left her husband for Peter, who married her in 1943. Both had affairs, and Peter’s lovers included Joan Fontaine and Ava Gardner. Jigee became an alcoholic and drug addict and, in a ghastly accident, burned herself to death. Peter — who’d brought out a novel, The Canyon, when he was nineteen — wrote the screenplays of The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea, became a great friend of John Huston and Hemingway, and published a brilliant memoir, Dangerous Friends (1992), about them. He finally had a long and happy marriage to the elegant Scottish actress, Deborah Kerr.

Da es sich nur um ein Wohnviertel ohne speziellen Namen handelt, kam wohl jemand auf die Idee, bei Google Maps einen Namen einzutragen – denn dies kann jeder beantragen, und jeder kann auch Änderungen vorschlagen. Doch keine einzige Suchmaschine findet Schilder, Adressen oder Beschreibungen, dass der Häuserkomplex wirklich „Hitler Viertel“ heißt. Garbo soon persuaded MGM to hire Salka for the role of Marthy in the German-language version of Anna Christie. The Swede was not the only one who recognized that Salka’s creative talents were underutilized. As the Swedish actress negotiated a new contract giving her the choice of directors and scripts, she challenged the older actress to come up with dramatic ideas. Salka had recently enjoyed a biography of Christina, Sweden’s 17th-century monarch. MGM’s greatest star as the Swedish queen was an idea that appealed to Irving Thalberg, the studio’s chief of production. He liked Salka’s treatment but thought it needed more work. So commenced Salka’s decade as Garbo’s favorite screenwriter. “Queen Christina” (1933) ranks with “Camille” (1936) and “Ninotchka” (1939) as one of Garbo’s three greatest sound films. The émigré community certainly needed Viertel’s diplomacy. The struggling authors resented the popular ones. Misunderstandings arose between political refugees—those who had been aligned with the left or had strongly protested Nazism—and Jewish refugees, whose political sympathies ranged widely. The Austrians tended to band together; the musicians spoke their own language. The two opposing poles were Brecht and Thomas Mann, who had long disliked each other. Brecht saw Mann as a grandiose narcissist with no empathy for lesser spirits. Mann recoiled from Brecht’s combativeness, although when he read “Mother Courage and Her Children” he was forced to admit that “the beast has talent.” Viertel was born Salomea Sara Steuermann in Sambor, a city then in the province of Galicia, [2] which was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but today is in western Ukraine. Her father, Joseph Steuermann, was a lawyer and the mayor of Sambor [2] before antisemitism forced him to renounce his office. Her mother, Auguste ( née Amster) Steuermann, died in 1952 at Viertel's home in Santa Monica. Her siblings were the composer and pianist Eduard Steuermann; Rosa (1891–1972), married from 1922 until her death to the actor and director Josef Gielen; and Polish national football player Zygmunt Steuermann, who perished during the Holocaust. [3]Echte Häuser, falsche Beschriftung: Das „Hitler Viertel“, Quelle: Google Maps Empörung bereits 2015 Journalist Rifkind begins her impressive biography of screenwriter Salka Viertel (1889-1978) with a question: How can so "large and estimable" a woman "been more or less forgotten in America"? The author hopes Salka (as she is referred to throughout) will provide a role model for a new generation of readers, especially women, currently experiencing the same kinds of geopolitical issues of human migration and anti-Semitism that Salka also suffered. Her early years in Austro-Hungary were privileged. She acted on stages throughout Europe, and her circle of friends included Franz Kafka and Max Brod. In 1928, with National Socialism on the rise, Salka and her filmmaker husband, Berthold, along with thousands of other refugees, fled to greater Los Angeles. They both worked with F.W. Murnau on film projects and befriended other immigrants like Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ernst Lubitsch. Rifkind chronicles in meticulous detail Salka's substantial career in a hostile Hollywood studio system that regularly ignored the contributions of women. She wrote screenplays for a number of films, most notably Queen Christina (1933), working closely with producer Irving Thalberg and the film's star, Greta Garbo, who took Salka under her wing. Their relationship would become the "longest and most important…either of them would ever have in Hollywood." Rifkind calls Salka a "connector of people." Her legendary Sunday afternoon gatherings at her Santa Monica home on Mabery Street became an intellectual "place of shelter" for immigrants, including Sergei Eisenstein, Aldous Huxley, and Thomas Mann and Christopher Isherwood, two of Salka's best friends. She helped refugees find jobs and places to stay, and she provided financial support. Her activities with political organizations supporting refugees drew the attention of the FBI, which tapped her phones and read her mail. In 1953, Salka moved to Switzerland, where she wrote her memoir, The Kindness of Strangers. It is more often in the imaginative literature about Hollywood and the 1930s exiles, rather than in the histories, that women play prominent roles and emerge as fully fleshed characters: Anna Trautwein in Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Paris Gazette, for example; or Erich Maria Remarque’s heroines in Shadows in Paradise and The Night in Lisbon; and Salka herself, who appears in fictional form in Joseph Kanon’s Stardust, Elizabeth Frank’s Cheat and Charmer, Gavin Lambert’s Inside Daisy Clover, Christopher Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood, Irwin Shaw’s short story “Instrument of Salvation,” and, fleetingly, in the film The Way We Were. Yet these glimpses can’t compensate for the absence of real women in the copious nonfiction, where at best they are underrepresented and at worst virtually erased. Fortunately, but glacially, the landscape is changing. Martin Sauter’s Liesl Frank, Charlotte Dieterle, and the European Film Fund not only provides the first comprehensive study of the EFF but also properly credits Frank and Dieterle as the chief administrators of the fund—credit that has previously been granted to its more high-profile male directors, Paul Kohner and Ernst Lubitsch. In his book, Sauter aims specifically to remedy the exclusion of women in the histories of Hollywood and the antifascist emigration. He underscores Britishprofessor S. Jay Kleinberg’s creditable assertion that women are “systematically omitted from the accounts of the past. This has distorted the way we view the past; indeed it warps history by making it seem as though only men have participated in the events worthy of preservation.” Other scholars are also working to redress the oversight. Cari Beauchamp’s Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood; Erin Hill’s Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production; Evelyn Juers’s House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann; and Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun’s essay about Salka Viertel, “The Salon in Exile,” from Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation have all begun to fill in the blanks. Significant, too, is the robust state of exile-studies scholarship in Europe. Katharina Prager’s German-language biography of Salka Viertel, “Ich bin nicht gone Hollywood!, ”is especially noteworthy, as is her examination of Viennese modernism, Berthold Viertel: Eine Biografie der Wiener Moderne. But in America there is much more work to be done. Prager, Katharina. (2007) "Ich bin nicht gone Hollywood!" Salka Viertel – Ein Leben in Theater und Film, ISBN 978-3-7003-1592-6, Wien: Braumüller Verlag.