Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism: 41 (Weimar & Now: German Cultural Criticism) - Softcover

Bahr, Ehrhard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520257952 ISBN 13: 9780520257955

Publisher: University of California Press, 2008

Synopsis

Weimar on the Pacific Featuring such examples as film noir and Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus", this book shows how a community of exiles reconstituted modernism in the face of the traumatic political and historical changes they were living through.

About this title

Review:

"This is a wonderful book."--Modern Language Review (02/09/2010)

Synopsis:

In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals - including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg - who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism. Weimar Germany and its culture, with its meld of eighteenth-century German classicism and twentieth-century modernism, served as a touchstone for this group of diverse talents and opinions."Weimar on the Pacific" is the first book to examine these artists and intellectuals as a group. Ehrhard Bahr studies selected works of Adorno, Horkheimer, Brecht, Lang, Neutra, Schindler, Doblin, Mann, and Schoenberg, weighing Los Angeles' influence on them and their impact on German modernism. Touching on such examples as film noir and Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus", Bahr shows how this community of exiles reconstituted modernism in the face of the traumatic political and historical changes they were living through.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0520257952
• ISBN 13: 9780520257955
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384