In her book, The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood, author and book critic Donna Rifkind vividly describes the 1930s and 1940s, when 10,000 German-speaking refugees, most of them Jews, found a safe haven from Nazism in Los Angeles. These exiles included professors, novelists, stage and film directors, symphony orchestra conductors, screenwriters, music composers, film actors and actresses, movie producers, and a host of motion picture technicians. Historians have termed the exodus “…the most complete migration of artists and intellectuals in European history.”
The émigrés from Germany and Austria included Thomas Mann, Billy Wilder, Max Reinhardt, Bruno Walter, Berthold Brecht, S. Z. Sakall, Ernst Lubitsch, Fred Zinnemann, Otto Klemperer, Peter Lorre, Arnold Schoenberg, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Franz Werfel.
Part of the latter’s harrowing escape route included a six-week stop in the French city of Lourdes. Rifkind reports that Franz Werfel, though Jewish, “visited the Catholic shrine dedicated to Bernadette Soubiros and prayed for a miracle. He vowed that if he managed to escape from Europe, he would write a book to honor the saint.”
His The Song of Bernadette, published in 1941, was a bestseller, and the film of the same title won many awards. Rifkind sadly notes there were “Not nearly enough miracles” for those who desperately attempted to escape Nazism in the years before America’s entry into World War II.
The émigrés from Germany and Austria included Thomas Mann, Billy Wilder, Max Reinhardt, Bruno Walter, Berthold Brecht, S. Z. Sakall, Ernst Lubitsch, Fred Zinnemann, Otto Klemperer, Peter Lorre, Arnold Schoenberg, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Franz Werfel.
Part of the latter’s harrowing escape route included a six-week stop in the French city of Lourdes. Rifkind reports that Franz Werfel, though Jewish, “visited the Catholic shrine dedicated to Bernadette Soubiros and prayed for a miracle. He vowed that if he managed to escape from Europe, he would write a book to honor the saint.”
His The Song of Bernadette, published in 1941, was a bestseller, and the film of the same title won many awards. Rifkind sadly notes there were “Not nearly enough miracles” for those who desperately attempted to escape Nazism in the years before America’s entry into World War II.
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