Liesl Frank, Charlotte Dieterle and the European Film Fund

By Martin Sauter

Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Warwick University/ German Department

Supervised by Professor Erica Carter

February 2010 

Liesl Frank, Charlotte Dieterle and the European Film Fund

By Martin Sauter

Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Warwick University/ German Department Supervised by Professor Erica Carter February 2010

I am profoundly indebted to the many people, archives and institutions who have helped this thesis reach completion: to Warwick University for awarding me a bursary that allowed me to embark on my examination by fully concentrating on my research; to my doctoral supervisor, Professor Dr. Erica Carter who shepherded me through this thesis and who taught me what it requires to be a scholar and historian; to Professor Emeritus Dr. John Spalek, Albany, for letting me have the use of his house while I conducted research at the State University of New York at Albany, and especially for generously making his personal exile archive accessible to me; to Gero Gandert from the Kinemathek, Berlin, who encouraged me to write about the European Film Fund and who shared his knowledge about German-Jewish émigrés with me, and, also, for putting me in touch with a number of descendants of erstwhile émigrés in Hollywood; to Robert Koster, Lupita Tovar-Kohner, Pancho Kohner, Renata Lenart, and John Pommer in Los Angeles for generously giving of their time and providing me with first-hand accounts of the exile experience; to Dr. Jan-Christopher Horak, Los Angeles, who also encouraged me in my decision to make the European Film Fund the topic of my doctoral thesis; to Holly-Jane Rahlens, Berlin, for putting me in touch with Gero Gandert and Renata Lenart; to Dr. Carey Harrison, New York, for sharing his memories of his mother, Lilli Palmer, with me; to Dr. Dr. Helwig Hassenpflug, Berlin, for tirelessly answering all my questions regarding the life in exile of the late Blandine Ebinger, his former wife; to Dr. Virginia Sease, Dornach/ Switzerland, and Dr. Erich Frey, Los Angeles, for talking to me about their encounters with Liesl Frank; to Dr. Thomas Elsaesser, Amsterdam, for providing me with a copy of his interview with the late Walter Reisch.

Thanks must also go to the many librarians and archivists who have helped and assisted me in my research: to Barbara Hall at the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills; to Caroline Sisneros at the Louis B. Mayer Library at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles; to Marje Schütze-Coburn and Rachelle Balinas Smith at the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; to Gerrit Thiess at the Kinemathek Berlin; to John Vernon and Robert Ellis at the National Archives at College Park/ Maryland; to Mary Y. Osielski at the Grenander Department of Special Collections at the State University of New York at Albany; to Katrin Kokot and Sylvia Asmus at the Exile Archive of the German National Library at Frankfurt/ Main; to

Miriam Intrator and Irit G. Pinchovski at the Center for Jewish History in New York; to Carmen Kaspar, Elke Tietz-Allmendinger, Hildegard Dieke and Jan Buerger at the German Literature Archive at Marbach; to Ina Prescher, Synke Vollring, Elgine Helmstädt, Nicky Rittmeyer and Andrea Rolz at the Academy of Arts in Berlin; and to Dr. Stefan Mörz at the Archives of the City of Ludwigshafen. I am also deeply indebted to Barbara Bab-Houlehan, Kentucky, and Marianne Brünn-Kortner, Berlin, for allowing me to photocopy documents pertaining to their fathers, Julius Bab and Fritz Kortner respectively. Furthermore, I would like to thank Dr. Ian Wallace, Bath, Brian Neve, Bath, Dr. Armin Loacker, Vienna, Dr. Helmut G. Asper, Bielefeld, and Werner Sudendorf, Berlin, for their help and advice.

Last but not least, I should like to thank my former employer, Chanel S. A. in Paris, as well as my friends Martin Wörle, Frank Schott, Tülay and Ceyhan Özbek, Bruno Secchi, Benoit Dufrene, Stefan Fuhrmann and Michael Chambers for their understanding, support, and generosity over the past three years.

Abstract

Setting out to provide a definitive history of the European Film Fund (EFF), the purpose of this thesis is as follows: first, to draw attention to the many exile and refugee organisations by examining one of them, the EFF. As a study of a refugee organisation founded as a result of Nazism, my examination of the EFF not only fills an existing gap in film history as far as the EFF itself is concerned. Refugee organisations in general have received scant attention by exile scholars. By making one refugee organisation the focus of my inquiry, I am also highlighting the presence of women in the topic of exile as two women, Liesl Frank, wife of the writer Bruno Frank, and Charlotte Dieterle, wife of the director William Dieterle, were at the centre of the EFF. My investigation of this organisation demonstrates that women played a much larger role in exile and exile communities than history and literature have thus far accorded them. Additionally, I show how the political situation after 1933, including apathy by the international community, led to the founding of the EFF. Lastly, by shifting the focus away from figureheads of the émigré community to below-the-line film artists, technicians, theatre artists and so on, I foreground those refugees whose lives have hitherto been obscured by their more famous fellow émigrés.

List of Abbreviations

ASC - American Society of Cinematographers

EFF - European Film Fund

ERC - Emergency Rescue Committee

ERF - European Relief Fund

HANL - Hollywood Anti-Nazi League

HICEM - Acronym of the names of three organisations: HIAS (=Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), ICA (Jewish Colonization Agency), and Emigdirect.

HUAC - House Un-American Activities Committee

IATSE - International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Machine Operators of the United States and Canada

IRA - International Relief Association

MPRF - Motion Picture Relief Fund

Chapter One

Introduction

Until 1989, when the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, now the Deutsche Kinemathek, acquired the Paul Kohner Archive, the story of the European Film Fund was shrouded in mystery. Though references to the EFF in the then nascent field of exile research were numerous, researchers were confronted with a lack of empirical data and thus had to rely on secondary sources to research what this thesis will argue was a highly significant organisation in the history of film exile. These sources - biographies and autobiographies - tended to be vague or anecdotal in their allusions to the EFF. Referring to the sketchy picture that existed of the EFF, E. Bond Johnson, one of the first scholars to conduct research on the EFF in 1976, quoted Paul Kohner’s brother, Frederick, as commenting that, ‘the only way to write about the Fund is in a sort of Rashomon¹ - that’s how multifarious the accounts and opinions were when he began his research on this part of his brother’s activity’ (Bond Johnson in Spalek & Strelka 1976: 136). In 1975, Marta Feuchtwanger, in her oral history with Lawrence Weschler,² had already said that ‘... there was this foundation which is called European Film Fund, which was founded by Lisl [sic] Frank [...] and Charlotte Dieterle [...].What I should stress also was that the whole film people did so much for it [......]. Nobody ever speaks about it; I’m always upset that they have no more recognition’.³ The relative wealth of archival data now available on the EFF, has spawned surprisingly few investigations of this particular organisation, or indeed of similar organisations that sprang up as a result of the exile experience. To date, the most coherent account of the EFF can be found in H.G. Asper’s seminal Etwas besseres als den Tod ..., but since Asper’s intention was not to furnish a scholarly study of the organisation, his chapter on the EFF is factual and anecdotal rather than analytical. However, Asper’s pioneering account served as an inspiration for me to embark on my own investigation of this organisation.

My thesis sets out, by contrast, to breathe new life into our perception of the EFF by providing its definitive history. To this end, I have drawn extensively on archival sources. Those sources will be discussed at greater length at the end of this chapter. However, the EFF must also be seen as one case study within a lager historiography of exile in Hollywood. This thesis begins therefore with a review of that historiography, which can be broadly classified under three headings: early histories of exile in Hollywood and the United States, autobiographies and biographies, and studies on film exile. I refer in the body of this thesis to the wide range of literature on American film history I have consulted, as well as works on the contemporary politics of the 1930s and 40s that provide a conceptual and contextual framework for my investigation, enabling me to put the EFF - its founding and its operations - into a political and sociological perspective.⁴

Early Histories of Exile in Hollywood and the United States

Although primary and secondary literature relating directly to the EFF - or any other refugee organisation that emerged as a result of Hitler’s rise to power - is sparse, the related field of literature on exile is vast. The use of the term ‘literature on exile’ is a deliberate choice on my part in order not to confuse what has been written on exile with literature that was written in exile, which John Spalek refers to as exile literature (see: Spalek 1982: xi). Though references to the EFF in the literature on exile are often cursory and sometimes even inaccurate, the findings of exile scholars and researchers prove an important source of information concerning the Los Angeles émigré community in general. As literature on exile has spawned a whole subgenre of popular publications, for reasons of precision dividing the field into scholarly and journalistic approaches would seem appropriate.⁵

The first book on the broader topic of anti-Nazi emigration goes back to 1939 when Klaus and Erika Mann first published their collaboratively written Escape to Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939). To this day their book has remained a significant and invaluable reference work on exile. The Manns wrote their book from an anti-Nazi stance, as a clear statement against Nazi Germany and its annihilation of German culture, with the intention of drawing attention to the ‘other Germany’, in other words, those Germans who were not contaminated by Nazism. Owing to the extraordinary access both Manns had to various émigré circles that formed around the world - in Zürich, Paris, London, Los Angeles - their book has never lost validity. Klaus and Erika Mann not only lived in a remarkable number of places that became émigré hubs, but knew many exiled writers, directors, and actors intimately. Theirs is a tersely written, sharply observed book, that covers literary as well as filmic emigration. Escape to Life provides an early, yet comprehensive overview of exile while the book’s structure -starting with the political situation in Nazi Germany following Hitler’s takeover and then moving on to discuss various émigré hubs - makes it evident that it served as a blueprint for Jean-Michel Palmier’s arguably more ambitious Weimar en exile (Paris: Payot, 1988), published nearly fifty years later.

One of the first significant publications focussing exclusively on exiled German-Jewish writers appeared in 1947, when the former exile Alfred Kantorowicz, in collaboration with Richard Drews, published Verboten und verbrannt (Berlin: Ullstein, 1947), a first attempt at coming to terms with the extent and ramifications of literary exile. Also included in Verboten und verbrannt are ‘inner émigrés’ such as Erich Kästner and writers like Franz Kafka who, of course, had long been dead when the Nazis came to power, but whose inclusion is due to the central role played by the exiled writer Max Brod in Kafka’s life and the publication of his work. The body of Verboten und verbrannt consists of brief biographical sketches of nearly two hundred writers, followed by an excerpt of one of their works. Though Verboten und verbrannt is little more than a compendium of the literary exile, Kantorowicz and Drews explain in the introduction to their book that their aim was to

inspire curiosity; to provide a first, rough, non-sectionalised and not yet complete overview; a reference book, which gives an idea about the scope of those who were banned and burnt;⁶ nothing more and nothing less (Kantorowicz & Drews 1947: 10).

As a compendium of literary exile, published so shortly after the Holocaust, Verboten und verbrannt was certainly timely and fulfilled its documentary purpose. But a more comprehensive debate on exiled writers and their literary output only started almost twenty years later when in 1965 the exhibition Deutsche Exil-Literatur 1933-45 was opened at the German National Library in Frankfurt/ Main and subsequently travelled to 20 cities in and outside West Germany. This constituted the first significant attempt by West Germany to come to terms with its vanished literary heritage. In John Spalek’s assessment, the exhibition was of ‘seminal importance [...], stimulating] numerous other exhibits that served to call the public’s attention to the fact of the anti-Nazi emigration of the thirties’ (Spalek 1982: xvii). Spalek has also noted that already in the 1950s, several studies had appeared that examined the political emigration (see: Spalek 1982: xvi). Nonetheless, the effect of the Frankfurt exhibition was profound, for it certainly cannot be a coincidence that ‘the bulk of publications, especially on German literature in exile, occurred in the decade starting roughly in 1966 and continuing until about 1976’ (Spalek 1982: xvi).

The end of this decade saw two different publications on the topic of film exile, one of which marks the beginning of serious scholarly examination of exiled German-Jewish film artists. John Baxter’s The Hollywood Exiles (London: Macdonald & Jane’s, 1976) is a largely anecdotal account of European film artists from various European countries who came to live and work in Hollywood, starting in the 1920s. Although his book concludes with the forced emigration due to the rise of Nazism, Baxter’s book prefigured what would later become an important concern of film historians and exile researchers, inasmuch as he looks at the impact European film artists, writers, etc., had on Hollywood, starting with Lubitsch’s departure for Hollywood in 1923. Due to its journalistic style, Baxter’s book falls into the category of popular publications on exile, and thus is of limited consequence to the scholar today. However, seen in the context of its time, his was significant as one of the earliest works to consider the influence of Europeans on popular American culture. Moreover, Baxter’s book was also one of the earliest publications to - albeit briefly - mention the European Film Fund.

Considering the absence of scholarly interest since that date, it is interesting that 1976 was also the year in which the European Film Fund was first discussed in an academic context. In John Spalek and Joseph Strelka‘s, Deutsche Exilliteratur seit 1933, Band 1: Kalifornien (Bern: Franke, 1976), E. Bond Johnson attempts to recapitulate the history of the EFF and evaluate its role in the émigré community. However, although Bond Johnson had access to a number of primary sources - including personal testimonies from one of the key figures discussed in this thesis - a lack of empirical data, and the fact that exile research as a field of study to which he could refer was not yet in existence, make his account patchy and sometimes even downright inaccurate. He falls prey, for instance, to the often repeated error of confusing the European Film Fund with the European Relief Fund, which, in fact, was founded much later, after the EFF had already been dissolved. As mentioned earlier, Bond Johnson was well aware of the difficulty of writing about a subject with only limited sources to draw on. Thus he concludes his essay by saying,

the archival material on the EFF is still relatively scarce. Hopefully,

one day the activities of the Fund will be become clearer and its members deserve to be better known. [...] The more we know about the EFF, the better we will be able to understand the exile community, in which the EFF played a crucial role (Bond Johnson in Spalek & Strelka 1976: 144).

The fact that Bond Johnson himself pointed to the complexity and limitations of writing about a topic on which no reliable secondary sources exist, let alone archival material, represented a challenge for my own examination. Mindful of the blurry picture that has prevailed heretofore of the EFF, I was determined to use the archival material that has since become available to unravel the story of the organisation without losing sight of its inadequacies.

Autobiographies and Biographies

The publication of these early books and studies on exile was paralleled by a number of biographies and autobiographies of former émigrés that first began to appear over the course of the 1950s. They may have drawn attention to ‘the ca. 1, 500 film professionals to leave Germany after 1933 and Austria after 1938’(Horak 1986: 241) at a time when exile scholars were still largely preoccupied with the literary emigration. Most noteworthy are Leonhard Frank’s Links wo das Herz ist (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1952), Fritz Kortner’s Aller Tage Abend (Munich: Kindler, 1959), Friedrich Hollander’s Von Kopf bis Fuss (Munich: Kindler, 1959), Salka Viertel’s The Kindness of Strangers (New York/ NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969), Lilli Palmer’s Dicke Lilli - gutes Kind (Zurich: Dromer Knaur Verlag, Scholler & Co., 1974), and Frederick Kohner’s The Magician of Sunset Boulevard - The Improbable Life of Paul Kohner, Hollywood Agent (Palos Verdes/ CA: Morgan Press, 1977). These (auto)biographies came at a time when the topic of exile was not widely discussed in the public domain. Hence, besides serving as a source for exile researchers to glean necessary information on émigrés and the Hollywood émigré community, these books raised awareness among the general public concerning the issue of exile. After all, prior to Lilli Palmer’s publication of her autobiography, who in Germany knew that she was forced to leave the country of her birth because she was Jewish?

In terms of its relevance for researchers, Viertel’s book was probably the most influential.

As one of the premier hostesses of Hollywood’s émigré community, this MGM screenwriter, Garbo confidante, and wife of director Berthold Viertel, had formidable access to various overlapping émigré circles. An actress turned screenwriter by profession, Viertel was politically left wing and an active member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Regular guests at her gatherings consisted of a motley mix of intellectuals, writers, directors and actors. Bertolt Brecht, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Garbo, Gottfried Reinhardt were all regular attendees (see: Isherwood 1997: 49, 62, 92). Her memoirs, which focus on the years between 1933 - 45, are candid and peppered with anecdotes and personal observations which made them a treasure trove for exile researchers at a time when primary and secondary sources, particularly those on film artists, were still relatively scarce. This is evidenced, for instance, in the publications of film critic John Russell Taylor (Strangers in Paradise, New York/ NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), or Anthony Heilbut, himself the son of German-Jewish refugees (Exiled in Paradise, New York/ NY: Viking Press, 1983), both of whom draw on The Kindness of Strangers. Of these however, Heilbut, Taylor, Viertel, and Kohner, make only more or less cursory mention of the EFF, conveying an inaccurate picture of the organisation which, if anything, contributed to promulgating the legend that surrounds it. However, even now, thirty years after its publication, Viertel’s book is often referred to, for instance, by Carola Stern in her biography of Liesl Frank’s mother, Fritzi Massary (Die Sache die man Liebe nennt, Berlin: Rowolth, 1998) and Diana McLellan in her examination of ‘Sapphic Hollywood’ (The Girls - Sappho Goes to Hollywood, New York/ NY: LA Weekly Books, 2000). As Viertel is central to McLellan’s book, McLellan relies heavily on The Kindness of Strangers, though she reveals details about Viertel’s life that Viertel herself either glossed over or chose to omit altogether, such as, for instance, her amorous relationship with Gottfried Reinhardt or her acquaintance with both Mercedes de Acosta and Marlene Dietrich. This underscores the limitations of autobiographical sources as they are often self-serving. Their point of view is wholly subjective and they are based on the author’s memory which, by nature, is unreliable. Thus, if autobiographies are used at all, they must ideally be backed up by empirical sources.

Studies on Film Exile

It was also in the mid-1970s that Jan-Christopher Horak, having received a grant from the American Film Institute in 1975, embarked on a series of oral histories, interviewing some formerly exiled film artists such as Douglas Sirk, Paul Andor, Johanna Kortner and Carl Esmond.⁷ Horak’s oral histories were subsequently published in an article, ‘The Palm Trees Were Gently Swaying’ (In: Image 23.1., 1980), which ‘can be regarded as the first written (academic) publication on film emigration’ (Horak in Horak XiX: 1984). Thus, Horak can be credited with launching the scholarly examination of German-Jewish film artists, and in time, he would emerge as the leading figure in the field of exile research. Horak’s article, starting with a quote by Max Reinhardt in which he refers to the ‘wandering Jew’ and the age-old persecution of the Jews, sets out to establish the basic parameters for the scholarly study of film exile by providing an introductory overview of issues relevant to film emigration, including cultural differences (language problems, the difficulties of adapting to a new country, etc.); the travails of the journey into exile, which in most cases did not lead directly to Hollywood but usually either via Vienna or Paris; the problems faced by such below-the-line personnel as the cinematographers Eugen Schüfftan, Curt Courant, etc. Horak’s article not only touches on a number of topics which, at the time, had barely been commented on (e.g. visa regulations, or the relative ease with which musicians established themselves in Hollywood), he also deserves credit for mentioning émigré actresses such as Gisela Werbezirk and Mady Christians, people who, even today, are rarely mentioned in exile studies, reflecting the absence of women from exile research in general. Since exile research was still in its infancy and Horak having had limited archival material and reliable secondary sources to draw on, ‘The Palm Trees ...’ constitutes a grass-roots effort. However, the limited availability of empirical data and trustworthy secondary sources almost inevitably caused ‘The Palm Trees ...’ to have its inadequacies, including factual errors.⁸ Also, ‘The Palm Trees .’ does not yet have the clear focus of inquiry that Horak would bring to his subsequent examinations of film exile. But, as he himself elucidates, “To measure the influence of the Middle European émigrés on Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s would be a much larger task than the one set forth here” (Horak 1980: 32). In that respect ‘The Palm Trees.’ is revealing, inasmuch as it already hints at what would become Horak’s subsequent preoccupation - the émigrés’ involvement in Hollywood anti-Nazi films - to which he already dedicates several paragraphs in this, his pioneering attempt at an overview of film exile. With this article Horak laid the foundation for the scholarly examination of film exile and, more importantly, provided a stimulus for fellow scholars to follow up on his findings.

Hence, it can be no surprise that barely two years after ‘The Palm Trees ...’ was published, Maria Hilchenbach published her doctoral thesis, Kino im Exil (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1982), which is also an attempt at a general overview of film exile and as such, quite obviously inspired by Horak. Seen in hindsight, it appears that with Horak’s article, the floodgates were opened, and the topic of exiled German-Jewish film artists moved to the centre of the attention of exile researchers. In 1984, for instance, film historians Hans-Michael Bock and Hans-Helmut Prinzler launched the Cinegraph Research Institute and, through the Munich-based publisher Edition Text und Kritik, they have since periodically published important reference works on exiled film artists such as Reinhold Schünzel, Joe May, or E.A Dupont.⁹ Two other significant early 1980s works on exile also both came out in the same year. They are not dissimilar to Horak’s ‘The Palm Trees ...’ in approach and subject matter, since they echo Horak’s concern with finding a more scholarly basis for exile research. However, they became more of a hybrid than Horak‘s article. John Russell Taylor’s Strangers in Paradise (New York/ NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), and Anthony Heilbut’s Exiled in Paradise (New York/ NY: Viking Press, 1983), both published in 1983, discuss the broader topic of German-Jewish exile while also making frequent mention of exiled Jewish film artists, including through references to the EFF. While due to its source material, which consists of interviews and empirical data, among other sources, Heilbut’s study has more scholarly value than Taylor’s, which relies on secondary sources only, both must nevertheless be regarded as hybrids between popular and scholarly publications. In contrast to Taylor’s book, Heilbut’s account goes beyond the anecdotal, and rather than being solely based on secondary sources, he also draws on oral histories and personal correspondence with former émigrés. Whereas Taylor is a film critic, Heilbut is an academic. As the American born son of German-Jewish émigrés, Heilbut can be considered a figure whose background provided the impetus for his preoccupation with exile, calling to mind the late Karsten Witte who, in a report on the publication of Berlino-Vienna-Hollywood at the 1981 Venice Biennale alluded to Thomas Elsaesser (UK), Bernard Eisenschitz (France), and Jan-Christopher Horak (USA) with the remark, ‘It was primarily the children of emigrants who first embarked on exile research’.¹⁰

Prior to Strangers in Paradise, Taylor, besides writing for Sight & Sound, served in 1969 as jury member at the Berlin Film Festival. He was also Hitchcock’s official biographer and had already published a number of bio-critical studies, all revolving around Hollywood figures from the 1930s/40s, from which it is only a small leap to the topic of exile.¹¹ Taylor’s and Heilbut’s books share some striking similarities as well as some differences. Besides discussing the same subject matter and being published in the same year, they are both influenced by Salka Viertel‘s autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers, from which they frequently quote. While Heilbut focuses solely on German-Jewish emigration, however, Taylor’s book, echoing Baxter‘s, includes émigrés from other European countries.

The scarcity of scholarly literature on exiled film artists at the time led to both books being at least consulted sometimes even cited by, scholars, and consequently both have their detractors as well as their supporters. Although his work is much more ambitious in scope, it is apt to introduce Jean-Michel Palmier’s Weimar en exile at this point. Published five years after Taylor’s and Heilbut’s publications, it resembles theirs inasmuch as it is also something of a hybrid between an scholarly study and a popular publication. Like Heilbut, Palmier draws on a number of sources, including archival data and oral histories. And it is no doubt these oral histories which sparked his preoccupation with exile in the first place, for they were all with well known figures connected to Weimar culture: Blandine Ebinger, Maria Ley Piscator, Lotte Eisner, etc. Nevertheless, Palmier also drew on secondary sources, since exile research at this point was yet in its embryonic stage, and archival sources were still relatively sparse.¹²

In another parallel to both Taylor and Heilbut, Weimar en exile also remained Palmier’s sole contribution to the field of exile research before his untimely death in 1998. Palmier’s concern with exile derives from the fact that he was a professor of Esthéthique et des sciences de l’art at Université Paris 1/ Panthéon-Sorbonne. Weimar culture was his area of expertise, with his publications on the topic being numerous.¹³ It is precisely this culture, referred to by Palmier as ‘one of the richest [such] that it strikes us as forming an almost unique example’ (Palmier 2006: 17) which was lost following the Nazi takeover, prompting Palmier to embark on a monumental effort of memorialisation, ‘to remember their story’ (Palmier 2006 18).

In Weimar en exile Palmier strives to cover the entire emigration, including film artists, writers, academics, and political refugees, as well as all the émigré hubs in such countries as France, Switzerland, the UK, the Netherlands, Turkey, and China. Palmier’s book is, in fact, a compendium of German-Jewish exile. This clearly sets it apart from most other studies on exile, and was in its time a far more ambitious undertaking than most previous efforts, including Taylor’s or Heilbut’s. Justifying his decision to take an all-inclusive approach to the topic of exile, Pamier explains that

the scope of the subject, and its complexity, suggest that it should either be tackled collectively or that its scope should be very closely delimited (Palmier 2006: 15).

Weimar en exile bears a faint resemblance to the Manns’ Escape to Life, and the frequency with which he refers to their book make it obvious that it served as an inspiration for his own work. Issues Palmier discusses - and which echo Escape to Life - include the events leading up to the Nazi takeover; Goebbels’ establishment of the Reich Chambers of Culture, what these various chambers entailed, how they functioned and, also, their well-known consequences for Jewish artists; anti-Nazi theatre in exile; émigré periodicals; the rise and fall of the Popular Front; the German Resistance; and the émigrés’ perspectives on post-war Germany.

Although Palmier’s mission - large-scale and ambitious as it is - is without precedent, some sections of the book crash under its enormous scope. Clearly, Palmier is much more at ease discussing writers, politicians and academics such as Willi Münzenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, or Carl von Ossietzky, as his knowledge on - and probably interest in - them is that much more profound than that concerning film artists. Consequently, while Weimar en exile is a valuable research tool in many respects, it is also a warning sign that by expanding the scope the risk of inaccuracy increases. Certainly, in a move inspired by Horak’s examination of the impact of refugee film artists on Hollywood, the focus of exile researchers slowly started to shift from the mid-1980s on from a general to a more detailed observation of the influence the exiles brought to bear on the US film industry. This is manifest, for instance, in an exhibition held at the Max Kade Institute of the University of Southern California in 1986. While the exhibition covered the German-speaking emigration to Hollywood, starting with Carl Lammle’s arrival in the US in 1884, it nevertheless homed in on the years after 1933. While the catalogue to the exhibition identifies several areas and genres where the impact of émigrés on American popular cinema is palpable (e.g. the horror film, the use of film scores, the social problem film) the fact that exile research was still in its early stages is evidenced by the curator’s comment that after 1933, they could only detect one single ‘genre influenced by the Germans’ (Angst-Norwik & Sloan 1986: 9). This, of course, was film noir, although Paul Schrader - one of the first to link the émigrés’ presence in Hollywood to film noir - himself said that ’there is a danger of overemphasizing the German influence on film noir’ (Schrader in Belton 156: 1996), while film historian Andrew Sarris, for instance, claims that ‘[film noir] is very difficult to define or even categorize as a self-enclosed genre simply because it is largely a critical afterthought in film history’ (Sarris 1998: 104).¹⁴

Besides the contentious issue of film noir, Horak and H.G. Asper would eventually identify other genres on which the émigrés brought their influence to bear (see below). Nevertheless, film noir - and the émigrés’ hand in it - has since become a major focal point for exile researchers and film historians. Two scholars to also highlight the refugees’ influence on this genre are Christian Cargnelli and Michael Omasta. In Schatten Exil - Europäische Emigranten im Film noir (Vienna: PVS Verleger, 1997), they contend that ‘one quarter, or based on other criteria one third of films noirs were made by directors from the Old World’ (Cargnelli & Omasta 1997: 9). However, their book does much more than underscoring the high émigré presence in film noir. Taken together, the contributing essays amount to a study of the lives and working conditions of the refugees in exile, using their impact on film noir as a basis. For instance, the chapter on cinematographer Franz Planer, who collaborated on a number of films noirs, tells of the ‘tricky undertaking [to attain membership in the American Society of Cinematographers]’ (Müller in Cargnelli & Omasta 1997: 156), thus drawing attention to one of the major obstacles the exiles faced: that of union membership. Another chapter examines the émigré contribution to films that are hybrids between film noir and anti-Nazi films. In essence, Schatten Exil underscores the degree to which American film history and exile research are invariably connected. Cargnelli and Omasta’s book is also a fine example of how exile research has evolved from the wide angle vision of its infancy to the narrow focus of today which allows for much more detailed scrutiny of, for instance, a particular genre or a particular group of émigrés.

Another example to underscore this point is Josef Garncarz’s contribution to Phillips’ and Vincendeau’s Journeys Of Desire (London: BFI, 2006). Unlike Horak in Anti-Nazi-Filme der deutschsprachigen Emigration von Hollywood 1939 - 1940 (see below), Josef Garncarz’s preoccupation in ‘The Ultimate Irony - Jews Playing Nazis in Hollywood’ is not so much with the émigrés’ influence on anti-Nazi films, but the question of the motivation for them to star in these. Hence, rather than just gauging the émigrés’ input in anti-Nazi films, Garncarz - whose essay appeared twenty years after Horak’s trailblazing study - takes his examination one step further. This aptly illustrates the development exile research has undergone.

While early publications on film exile like those by Heilbut, Taylor, but also those by Hilchenbach, Horak and Palmier suffered from a dearth of empirical data as well as a lack of reliable secondary literature, which often resulted in inaccuracy, their contributions were the fundament for what would become known as exile research. It is owing to those early contributions, which, as we have seen, were often overviews or compendiums on exile, that a more detailed and focussed examination of film exile has become possible.

Jan-Christopher Horak

Over the years, two towering figures have emerged in the field of research on exiled German-Jewish film artists, with both scholars having significantly contributed to our understanding of exile in Hollywood and its implications. The first of these is Jan-Christopher Horak. Taking into account Horak’s family history as the son of émigrés, and the political and cultural background of the 1970s, it is not surprising that he should have emerged as a leading figure in exile research. Horak stands as a scholar and pioneer to whom every subsequent exile researcher is indebted, inasmuch as he embarked on groundbreaking research at a time when no academic studies on the émigré film artists were available. Horak’s contribution to exile research is invaluable in several respects. First, he pioneered an oral history approach. Furthermore, by identifying genres specific to émigrés, he not only provided subcategories for future researchers, but also laid the foundation for similar investigations.

Horak’s preoccupation with exile research was triggered by his MA thesis on Lubitsch. This preoccupation with Lubitsch - who was, after all, an early émigré - resulted in his oral history project and the subsequent publication of ‘The Palm Trees ...’. This, in turn, sparked an more focused inquiry of how - or if - these exiled film artists had any influence on American culture, particularly its film industry, leading to the publication of Anti-Nazi-Filme der deutschsprachigen Emigration von Hollywood 1939 - 1940 (Münster: MAKS, 1984), his doctoral thesis. Put differently, quoting Horak himself, ‘once the biographical and filmographical facts of emigration are established, research can now move on to the next stage’ (Horak 1984: XV).

Anti-Nazi-Filme built on his previous research insofar as Horak drew on, first of all, the oral histories he previously conducted, as well other findings already used in ‘Palm Trees .

Anti-Nazi-Filme constitutes the first scholarly attempt to assess the mark the émigrés have left on the film industry of a host country, in this case the United States. His study, as Horak points out in the introduction ‘combines two areas of research which thus far have always been looked at separately - if at all: research on the German speaking emigration in Hollywood and research on American war propaganda’ (Horak 1984: XVii). He starts from the premise that the contribution of the émigrés to America’s film industry was more evident in the anti-Nazi films than in any other genre, maintaining that ‘the influence of the emigrant film-artists in Hollywood should not be underestimated, since as Europeans, they were in the position to fill certain gaps in Hollywood’s film industry’ (Horak 1984: XV). According to Horak, ‘of around 180 films, made between 1939 and 1945, which can be classified as anti-Nazi films, the émigrés contributed to sixty of them’ (Horak 1984: 80). Horak starts his examination by providing a detailed history of German-Jewish exile, including ties between the German and American film industries prior to 1933. He then looks at film propaganda in WWII, moving on to describe the changes in the official US position towards Nazi Germany and how this differed at times from that of Hollywood. Horak then gives an exhaustive account of the Office of War Information and its inception in June 1942, detailing its influence and the effect of its instructions on the US film industry. The body of Horak’s book, however, consists of a cross-section of 13 anti-Nazi films, selected for the significance of aspects of their production history and their reception. For each film, Horak starts by first recounting its production history, before moving on to its reception, followed by biographical sketches of émigré participants. He then gives a brief description of the film’s narrative followed by a textual analysis in terms of anti-Nazi propaganda. Horak surmises that even though the émigrés had a tendency to complain about the lack of realism in the antiNazi films, their input is nevertheless discernible. Not only did they manage to include in the narrative news from Nazi-occupied territory, gleaned from the exile press (e.g. Aufbau¹⁵), but in some cases they even had their own experience to draw on, as in the case of Mortal Storm (MGM, USA 1940), which owes its accurate depiction of Nazi barbarity to the émigré screenwriters George Froschel and Paul Hans Rameau, who had suffered at the hand of the Nazis.

Anti-Nazi-Filme ... was a landmark in film history inasmuch as it identifies a genre to which the émigrés measurably contributed. Horak shows how anti-Nazi films drew on other, preexisting genres such as, for instance, the gangster film, and how their narratives, symbols, and characters were modified to be recycled in the anti-Nazi films. Moreover, it is evident that Anti-Nazi-Filme ... is meant to inspire future researchers to follow up on the ground Horak has broken.

Fluchtpunkt Hollywood (Münster: MAKS, 1984) was published as an appendix to Anti-Nazi-Filme ..., Horak’s doctoral thesis. Fluchtpunkt can be regarded as an expansion of ‘The Palm Trees ...’ as the range of issues discussed is much broader. These issues include, for instance, emigration to Austria, Hungary, France and the UK, as these were the countries where most of the émigrés first sought refuge before finally settling in the US. Fluchtpunkt also makes it clear that it was political developments (e.g. the yielding to Nazism by Austria and Hungary; the invasion of France and the Blitzkrieg on the UK by Nazi Germany) that forced the émigrés to move on to the US. He also takes into account the film-business relations between Germany and the US prior to 1933, concluding that the subsequent integration of refugees arriving after the Nazi takeover was facilitated by the sizable German community that had already established itself in Hollywood by the time the majority of the exiles arrived. Other aspects he discusses in more detail than in ‘The Palm Trees .’ are the various waves of emigration (the first big wave arrived following the Anschluss, and the second after the outbreak of WWII), anti-Semitism and racism the émigrés faced in the US, and the founding of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. However, certain topics receive more attention than others, such as the collaboration in both Europe and the US between Koster, Pasternak and Jackson. This anticipates a future preoccupation of Horak‘s, which culminated in an article he co-wrote with Asper (see below). Unsurprisingly, Fluchtpunkt also covers the anti-Nazi films which, of course, had become his chief preoccupation.

Besides being a compendium of film exile - in which regard it resembles a number of similar publications discussed above that came out at the same time - what sets Fluchtpunkt apart is that it was one of the first reference works on film exile. In fact, the better part of the book consists of a lexicon of biographical data pertaining to exiled film artists. Needless to say, in those pre-Internet days when Fluchtpunk was first published, and when scholars had limited access to reliable biographical data on former émigrés, Fluchtpunkt was an invaluable, if not unique, research tool, enabling the reader to gather information at a glance on a vast number of émigrés, including actors, directors, producers, and all kinds of below-the-line personnel.

Horak’s chapter on ‘Exilfilm’ in Geschichte des deutschen Films (Jacobsen, Kaes,

Prinzler (eds.). Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler: 1993) also draws on his previous publications, notably on Fluchtpunkt Hollywood and Anti-Nazi-Filme, to provide a comprehensive summary of what was by now the mature field of exile research. The article allowed Horak to raise important new questions, such as the definition of exile film as opposed to film exile. Horak explains that exile film and film exile are two different entities, the latter, according to him, denoting the actual duration of exile of the exiled film artist, while the former specifically defines a film ‘that was made outside Germany after 1933, produced, directed, and written by German emigrants’ (Horak in Jacobsen, Kaes, Prinzler 1993: 101).

Demarcating exile film is indeed crucial, as it allows us to identify the possible contributions and influences of the émigrés on the film industry in the host country, be it France, the Netherlands, or the United States. Hence Horak rightly claims that ‘exile film must be embedded in film history as a chapter that runs parallel to that of the Third Reich’ (Horak in Jacobsen, Kaes, Prinzler 1993: 102), for, as he makes clear, ‘for a lot of German film-makers of the 1960s, the real German film history was not defined by fathers tainted by the Third Reich, but by émigrés like Fritz Lang and Lotte Eisner’ (Horak in Jacobsen, Kaes, Prinzler 1993: 102). Examples in support of Horak might include Werner Herzog’s friendship with Lotte Eisner and his remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu (Prana-Film Gmbh, Germany 1921; Werner Herzog Filmproduktion/ ZDF/ Gaumont International S.A.,W-Germany 1979); Schlöndorffs acceptance speech at the Academy Awards in 1980, in which he thanked Fritz Lang in particular; or Douglas Sirk’s influence on R.W. Fassbinder. Horak himself mentions several similar examples, including genres in which the émigrés had already excelled during their Weimar period and which were imported into the host country, one of them being the Kostümfilm,¹⁶ or its subgenre, the biography film or biopic. Moreover, the fact that a number of American films were based on German plays by émigré authors, e.g. Carl Zuckmayer’s Der Hauptmann von Köpenick, which was released as I Was A Criminal (John Hall Productions, USA 1945) in the USA in 1945, and involved a host of émigré-contributors, among others, Alfred Bassermann (male lead), Richard Oswald, the director, remaking his own Berlin production from 1931, Albrecht Joseph (screenplay), also proves Horak’s claim that exile film and the film of Third Reich cannot be separated. Horak explains, ‘for the exiled film-artists, exile film, like exile literature and exile journalism, was a continuation of the democratic traditions of German culture, such as they were prior to Hitler’s rise to power’ (Horak in Jacobsen, Kaes, Prinzler 1993: 102): democratic traditions which also found their expression in charitable organisations such as the EFF, which granted support for émigré film artists from all walks of life.

In ‘Three Smart Guys’, written in collaboration with Helmut G. Asper (In: Film Criticism, Vol. XI, nr.2, 1999), Horak further develops his comments on genre in exile film, here in relation to musical comedy. The title of the article refers to the first of a string of films by émigré-director Henry Koster, starring Deanna Durbin, Three Smart Girls (Universal Pictures, USA 1936). Like all of the film’s sequels, it was produced by émigré Joe Pasternak. The financial success of Three Smart Girls gave Koster and Pasternak enough clout to get their studio, Universal, to send for their collaborator, the screenwriter Felix Jackson, who was still in need of a visa.

When Horak and Asper wrote their article, Horak was head of the archives at Universal Studios, and thus had unrestricted access to the studio’s archives and records. Horak and Asper convincingly show how ‘three refugees from Adolf Hitler’s Germany [Henry Koster, Joe Pasternak, Felix Jackson] adapted themselves to the working methods of the studio system, while at the same time bringing to bear their European heritage. In doing so, they not only influenced briefly the formation of a major American film genre, the musical comedy, through the discovery and nurturing of a young star [Deanna Durbin], but in the process also literally saved a major Hollywood studio, Universal, from certain bankruptcy’ (Asper & Horak 1999: 135). Asper and Horak draw interesting parallels between the light, musical comedies Koster, Pasternak and Jackson had made in Europe and their subsequent Deanna Durbin musicals at Universal, showing that the latter were a continuation of the former, the only significant difference being that their star had now changed as the primary stars of their European output, Dolly Haas and Francisca Gaal, were now replaced by Deanna Durbin. The article also illustrates compellingly how the blueprint of Koster, Pasternak, and Jackson, since it had proven so profitable, was emulated by studios such as MGM. For all we know, the MGM musicals of the 1940a and 50s would not have been the same without the influence those three émigrés had on Hollywood’s film industry.

As many émigrés were still alive when Horak first embarked on exile research, he was able to rely on first-hand accounts. These oral histories, as we have seen, were Horak’s initial contribution to the field. Also, by shifting the focus away from the émigrés themselves to their creative output, he opened our eyes to the mark they left on the film industries of their host countries. Horak was also the first to clearly define exile film, thus narrowing the area of investigation from a plethora of films to which a number of émigrés contributed in varying degrees, to those films in which the input of the émigrés is distinctly discernible. In addition, he redefined the concept of national cinema, concluding that in the light of the substantial émigré contribution, the boundaries and the definition of German national cinema become blurred and thus are open for debate. Lastly, by looking at the contribution of cinematographers to (exile) film, Horak opened the field of vision beyond directors, screenwriters and actors to below-the-line personnel.

Yet, in spite of Horak’s substantial contributions - or, possibly, because of them - there is still ample room for further exploration. For instance, organisations that evolved as a result of exile have thus far received scant attention, yet their role was pivotal and often crucial to the survival of the émigrés. Therefore, Horak’s contribution to exile research must be seen as an incentive, an inspiration, to follow his lead. One scholar who has done so, and whose work is clearly influenced by Horak, is Helmut G. Asper.

Helmut G. Asper

Surveying the field of exile in the US further, a second figure, Helmut G. Asper, emerges as another important scholar therein. Their approaches complement each other insofar as Horak’s study of the émigrés offers an analytical framework for exile research, while Asper is best described as a painstaking gatherer of empirical data with an unerring focus on the existing gaps in exile research. Asper is a professor at Bielefeld University, specialising in German theatre in the 17th and 18th century as well as film, radio and theatre in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. His preoccupation with theatre is evident in his first edited publication on exile, Walter Wicclair und Marta Mierendorff: Im Rampenlicht der dunklen Jahre (Berlin: Sigma, 1989). The book homes in on the German stage actor Walter Wicclair - who fled Nazi Germany to settle in Hollywood - and his companion, Marta Mierendorff, and contains essays on theatre in exile, the Third Reich and in post-war Germany. In Asper’s subsequent edited publication, Wenn wir von gestern reden sprechen wir über heute und morgen - Festschrift für Marta Mierendorff zum 80. Geburtstag (Berlin: Sigma, 1991), the field of vision is expanded from theatre in exile to exile in general (e.g. exiled writers, screenwriters, painters, etc.), while Asper’s own contribution to the

book revolves around another German stage actor, Fritz Kortner, and his film, Der Ruf (The Last Illusion, Objektiv-Film Gmbh, Germany 1948/49).

Kortner, renowned for his theatre work in Germany until the Nazis forced him into exile, would eventually once again become one of Germany’s most noted post-war theatre directors. Der Ruf constitutes Kortner’s first project following his return to Germany from his exile in the United States. The film revolves around a professor - Mauthner, played by Kortner - who was forced into exile following Hitler’s rise to power. Once he returned to post-war Germany, the hostility and aversion towards Mauthner eventually led to his death. Asper’s concern in this essay is not so much emigration as remigration; thus he considers parallels between Mauthner’s narrative and Kortner’s own experiences, and the reaction the film received when it was first shown to German audiences. Der Ruf - even though directed by Josef von Baky, a non-émigré -was the brainchild of Kortner and written solely by him. Kortner saw the film as an act of reconciliation with Germany and the Germans. That he failed in this attempt, with Der Ruf resulting in a critical as well as a commercial failure, is testimony to post-war Germany’s reluctance to come to terms with its Nazi past.

Among Asper’s chief publications on exile research is, however, his seminal Etwas besseres als den Tod .... (Marburg: Schüren, 2002). Although published in 2002, its afterword indicates that Asper started research on the book seventeen years prior to its publication, interviewing many of the émigrés featured in the book between 1985 and 1987, among them Henry Koster, Walter Reisch, Paul Henreid and Felix Jackson. Some of Asper’s interviewees had never been interviewed before, including Ernest Lenart, Herbert Luft, Annemarie Schünzel-Stewart, Rudi Fehr or Rudi Feld. This fact, not to mention the book’s scope (655 pages, afterword and appendix not included), makes Etwas ... a unique research tool for any exile researcher or film historian.

Although Asper does dedicate several chapters to émigré actors, directors, screenwriters, and producers, the groups who traditionally had been at the centre of exile research, there is no denying that one of the main features of Etwas ... is Asper’s shift of focus to below-the-line personnel - editors, cinematographers, production designers, technicians - film-artists who had hitherto tended to be neglected by researchers. One example is Asper’s chapter on the all-but-forgotten production designer Rudi Feld, who, prior to his emigration collaborated with Kurt Gerron on his famous cabaret films.¹⁷ Gerron’s films featured a number of future émigrés,

including Blandine Ebinger or Sig Arno, but also artists who never made it into exile and perished in a concentration camp, as did indeed Gerron himself, or his collaborators Max Ehrlich and Otto Wallburg.

Similarly to many of his fellow émigrés, Feld had a difficult start in the US, not least because entry for production designers into their union was as strict as it was for other below-the-line-personnel. But, as Asper explains, since ‘Feld remained very close to his fellow émigrés’ (Asper 2002: 383), he eventually managed with their help to elbow his way into the Hollywood film industry. Not only that, but archival evidence shows that during this period of hardship Feld became a beneficiary of the EFF, and his is just one example of how crucial this organisation was for the survival of émigré film artists. In hindsight, the fact that Feld got his first break in an anti-Nazi film - after 11 years in exile - seems no surprise, as it seems to have become a rite of passage for émigrés to first prove their mettle in this particular genre. However, at long last, in 1946, Feld did obtain union membership, and his struggles in exile notwithstanding, as the title of Asper’s book aptly suggests, this was indeed better than the alternative: death in a concentration camp.

Asper also discusses a number of other émigrés who had previously received scant attention from film historians, including the editors Albrecht Joseph and Rudi Fehr or the choreographers Ernst and Maria Matray. The parallels to Horak are clear: Asper too started his research on exiled film artists with a series of oral histories, and in both cases the results of their findings led to crucial contributions to the field of exile research. In Horak’s case this was ‘The Palm Trees ...’, while Asper’s Etwas ... was no doubt influenced by Horak and as such could be considered an expansion of Horak’s work in ‘The Palm Trees ...’ as well as Fluchtpunkt Hollywood. Neither work is concerned with any aspect of exile in particular, but rather represents an all-inclusive overview of film exile, illustrating the diversity and the consequences of the German-speaking emigration to Los Angeles. More than Horak‘s, because of its scope and its emphasis on below-the-line personnel, Asper’s book also serves as a memorial to émigrés who had fallen by the wayside of exile research until he put them centre stage, commemorating their life, achievements, and ordeals as a result of Nazi rule.

In the introduction to Etwas ., Asper briefly sketches the political situation in Germany following Hitler’s rise to power, before moving on to discuss the various stations of exile such as France, England, the Netherlands, and Palestine, and dedicating a paragraph to those film artists who did not make it into exile and were subsequently murdered in the concentration camps, including the aforementioned Willy Rosen, Otto Wallburg and Kurt Gerron. But the body of Etwas . consists of ten chapters, each dedicated to a particular profession at the Hollywood film-studios, and discussing the impact of the émigrés. By covering virtually all professions associated with filmmaking - directing, producing, acting, writing, editing, cinematography, production-design, post-production - Asper is able to shed light on those among the émigrés who had until that point rarely been mentioned by exile researchers, including Reginald Le Borg, Gerd Oswald (directors), Helmut Dantine, Wolfgang Zilzer (actors), Albrecht Joseph (editor), and Fini Rudiger (animator). He would continue this enterprise in a later work, Nachrichten aus Hollywood, New York und anderswo (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2003), where he considers the correspondence of cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan and his wife Marlise with Siegfried and Lili Kracauer. Asper’s introduction consists of a biography of both Schüfftan and Kracauer, based on secondary as well as archival material, interspersed with excerpts from the Schüfftan-Kracauer correspondence and focussing on their lives following their arrival in the United States. Asper stresses that though Schüfftan’s and Kracauer’s friendship ‘was already mentioned by Karsten Witte in the afterword of the [second] German edition of Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler, nobody has so far followed up on it’ (Asper 2003: 1).¹⁸ Nachrichten ..., by contrast, shows how a focus on a cinematographer can open up new perspectives, and his study was also useful for my own research since both Kracauer and Schüfftan were at one time beneficiaries of the European Film Fund.

In the last chapter of Etwas ... , Asper considers exile film and film genres. Once more echoing Horak, Asper singles out Zuckmayer’s play Der Hauptmann von Köpenick,¹⁹ remade in Hollywood under the title, I Was a Criminal (USA 1945). As we have seen, Horak used I Was a Criminal as an example to emphasize the difficulties which a study of exile film introduces into the definition of a national cinema. The film was made in Hollywood, is based on a German play, is cast nearly in its entirety with émigré actors, and has an émigré director remaking a film he himself had previously made in Weimar Germany. All this prompts Horak to question whether this film should be seen as part of American or German film history. By contrast, Asper’s intriguing and extensive account of the film’s production highlights the difference in approach between Horak and Asper. Asper’s forte lies in the investigation of empirical data rather than any address to academic concerns, such as, for instance, issues in national cinema.

One shortcoming of Etwas ... is its tendency to the anecdotal, another is its failure to mention any aid organisations in which the émigrés were involved other than the short chapter he dedicated to the European Film Fund, though as one of the few consistent accounts on this organisation that are available, Asper‘s book is an important milestone for my own research. Other aid organisations, however, such as, for instance, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, the Emergency Rescue Committee or the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, to name but a few, are almost entirely ignored, highlighting a gap in exile research that is waiting to be filled.

A subsequent work, Filmexilanten im Universal Studio (Berlin: Bertz & Fischer Verlag, 2005), also has its origins in interviews Asper conducted in the 1980s with Henry Koster, Hans J. Salter and Curt Siodmak, who drew Asper’s attention to ‘the vast extent and significance of the work of the exiled German speaking film artists at Universal’ (Asper 2005: 292). Asper also mentions that it was the appointment of Jan-Christopher Horak as founding director of Universal Studio’s Archives and Collections which inspired him to embark on the project, as Horak not only ‘opened the archives to researchers from day one, but also encouraged [Asper] in his undertaking .’(Asper 2005: 292). The synergy between Horak and Asper would eventually result in the article discussed above, ‘Three Smart Guys‘, which Asper terms an ‘interim result of his undertaking’ (Asper 2005: 292). But while ‘Three Smart Guys’ focuses on the influence on Universal of only a small group of émigrés - Henry Koster, Felix Jackson and Joe Pasternak -Filmexilanten examines how Universal was influenced and shaped by the émigrés as a whole. Here, Asper does not solely home in on the twelve years of Nazi power, but looks at the studio’s history from its beginnings until the 1950s. Like Horak, Asper is interested here in the impact of the émigrés on certain aspects of Hollywood or/ and American culture.²⁰ He argues that ‘Universal is particularly suited for such an examination [measuring the émigrés’ influence] as émigré directors, producers, screenwriters, composers, actors and actresses worked there for well-nigh thirty years ...’ (Asper 2005: 11). Although the same applies to, for instance, Warner Bros.,²¹ Universal was distinct in that it was founded and run by a German immigrant. In addition, Universal had close affiliations with the German film industry going back to the Weimar Republic while Paramount’s - as well as MGM’s - affiliations with UFA were of a merely financial nature.²2 23 Lastly, although most of the major studios took on their fair share of refugees following Hitler’s rise to power, it is safe to say that Universal, along with Paramount and Warner Bros., was more of a haven for refugees than, for instance, Columbia, RKO or even MGM. Hence, Asper concludes that Universal not only gave a large number of émigrés including, for instance, Curt Siodmak, Koster, Pasternak, Jackson, Salter, etc., their first start in the US film-industry, but by doing so it contributed substantially to their successful integration into American society. Indeed, none of them returned to Germany following the end of WWII as other, less integrated, émigrés did. At the same time, the émigrés saved Universal from financial ruin, as evidenced in the Deanna Durbin musicals which were a collaborative effort between producer Joe Pasternak, director Henry Koster and screenwriter Felix Jackson.²⁴ Moreover, the émigrés’ ‘contributed to a transfer of European culture by adapting it for an American audience’ (Asper 2005: 289). This transfer of culture is particularly palpable in Universal’s Deanna Durbin musicals, which have a distinct European flair, as opposed to, for instance, MGM’s Meet Me In St. Louis (MGM, USA 1944), which seems far more American by comparison. In Three Smart Girls (USA 1936), the obvious European elements include the setting (contemporary Switzerland) and the use of classical music, which, in a traditional Hollywood musical, was unusual. Meet Me In St. Louis, on the other hand, is set, as the title suggests, in St. Louis in 1903, just before the World Fair. The song that gave the film its title had already been an American classic at the time of the making of the film.²⁵ The narrative and the characters in Koster’s film -a single parent , a divorcee whose ex-husband is about to marry an adventuress - would also have had no place in Louis B. Mayer’s ‘view of America [which] became America’s view of itself - a place and a people more virtuous, more godly, more resilient than anyplace else’ (Eyman 516 : 2005).²⁶ And while in Meet Me In St. Louis, ‘a paean to hearth and home’ (Eyman 354: 2005), plans to move from the peaceful and quiet city of St. Louis to the iniquitous New York, are abandoned, this is precisely where the family reunion in Koster’s film takes place.

One cannot help but wonder what else Asper might have unearthed, had the Universal archives not been closed following the Vivendi takeover.²⁷ The fact that this invaluable archival material may remain permanently inaccessible to researchers could now mean that the chapters in the history of Universal opened by Asper and Horak may never be closed - nor new ones opened - for sheer lack of accessible material. On another level, Asper’s study gives rise to speculations as to the émigrés’ influence on other studios - Warner Bros., MGM, Columbia, RKO, United Artists, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, not to mention the smaller ones like Republic or Monogram. It is certain that émigrés worked at all of these studios, but their impact, input and influence - if there was any - has never been thoroughly investigated. Filmexilanten must be regarded as an inspiration to do just that.

In summary, Asper’s contribution to film history in general and exile research in particular, is unquestionably crucial. Alongside Horak, by whom he was influenced and inspired, Asper has emerged as one of the field’s leading figures. Horak’s approach of course is analytical and diagnostic, while Asper’s own is investigative and biographical. The methodologies of both scholars complement each other however, inasmuch as the detection of data is as fundamental a part of exile research as their critical and contextual analysis. Asper was instrumental in memorialising those émigrés who tended to be ignored by scholars, thus instigating a shift of focus from émigré directors and actors to below-the-line personnel such as cinematographers, editors, production-designers, etc. In Filmexilanten, Asper investigated the émigrés’ impact on Universal, resulting in a groundbreaking study of how the émigrés brought their heritage to bear on one particular film studio. Clearly taking his cue from Horak, who had previously examined the émigrés’ influence on a particular film genre - the anti-Nazi films - Asper’s findings feed into what is now in any case a current shift in film history in general: notably studies of transnational cinema that bring to light the influence of European film artists on American cinema and culture.

Existing Gaps

Having scrutinised the existing literature on exile, I identified two persistent gaps. One of them is the absence of women. Peter Gay has already observed that, ‘very few of [the exile women] had ever really been remembered’ (Gay in Quack 1996: 354). Although Gay’s comment dates from 1995, little has changed since. This gap is all the more discernible in the light of the sheer number of books, studies, articles, and so on, that have been written on often prominent, exiled, male, film artists settling in Hollywood. Very few of these, however, mention the presence and achievements of women, conveying the impression that women were simply absent and that fleeing Nazi Germany was something that concerned only men. ‘No one’, Peter Gay has justly observed, ‘cared much about Mrs. Lion Feuchtwanger or Mrs. Herbert Marcuse or Mrs. Albert Einstein’ (Gay in Quack 1995: 354). Yet Liesl Frank, in a letter to Marta Mierendorff, wrote that ‘[...] women usually had an easier time adapting [to life in exile]’,²⁸ a claim corroborated by Sabine Quack, who, in Between Sorrow And Strength - Women Refugees of the Nazi Period (New York/ NY: Cambridge University Press, 1995) writes that ‘refugee women were better able to cope [with exile] than refugee men were’ (Quack in Quack 1995: 9).

Quack’s study is one of the few discussing the role women played in émigré circles in general and in refugee organisations in particular. Another is Andreas Lixl-Purcell‘s, Women Of Exile - German-Jewish Autobiographies Since 1933 (Westport/ CT: Greenwood Press, 1988). Although not concerned with exile women in Hollywood per se, both books constitute a pioneering effort in a neglected field insofar as they make women a visible agent in the topic of exile of German Jews. Lixl-Purcell’s book consists of biographies of several women, with a focus on their flight from Nazi Germany and their early years in exile. In a parallel to the lives of Liesl Frank and Charlotte Dieterle, who are at the centre of my own inquiry, the biographies of the women in Lixl-Purcell’s book also ‘confront the reader with provocative arguments against conformist models of identity’(Lixl-Purcell 1988: 6), for, as we shall see, exile not so much forced, as offered these women opportunities to assume roles previously deemed inappropriate. Unlike the majority of books available on exile men, none of the women featured in Lixl-Purcell’s book are famous in any way. They are, rather, ‘ordinary’ women describing in their own words how the exile experience changed their lives.

Lixl-Purcell’s study, although over twenty years old, has spawned surprisingly few related analyses, which is one of the reasons why it is still significant today. Another reason is, of course, the continuing preoccupation of scholars with the Holocaust and its consequences, one of which was exile. Approaching the topic of exile through biography, Lixl-Purcell’s method echoes that of many exile researchers and also served as a blueprint for my own examination. Furthermore, the relevance of Women Of Exile lies in the fact that analogously to Liesl Frank and Charlotte Dieterle, the women at the centre of Lixl-Purcell’s study, were confronted with ‘the recognition that the culturally prescribed role models offered no solutions to the problems of their lives [and thus] convinced many women of exile to experiment with radically new models of political behaviour’ (Lixl-Purcell 1988: 6).

Similarly to Lixl-Purcell, Sybille Quack also examines the lives of ordinary women who fled Nazi Germany. Her study includes several eyewitness reports of the exile experience such as Elizabeth Marum Lunau’s on the ‘Arrival at Camp de Gurs‘, or Rachel Cohn’s on ‘Women Émigrés in Palestine’. The main focus lies on the effect exile had on these women and the lives they led - or were able to lead - in their adopted country. Neither Lixl-Purcell nor Quack offer any insight on the role exile women played in Hollywood and in its émigré community. Quack, however, does acknowledge the importance ’refugee organisations [played] in settling refugees’ (Quack 1995: 6). Hence, several contributions in Quack’s study examine the input of women in organisations such as, for instance, the National Council of Jewish Women. In another parallel to my own investigation, Steven M. Lowenstein, in ‘Women‘s Role in the German-Jewish Immigrant Community’, argues that, ’[the] participation [of women within the congregational sphere] was generally behind the scenes and, on the surface at least, did not challenge the male predominance in official communal functions’ (Lowenstein in Quack 1995: 172). This, as we shall see, mirrors the role Liesl Frank and Charlotte Dieterle played in the EFF. Thus, while both Lixl-Purcell and Quack disregard the Hollywood exile community and its various aid organisations, their findings nevertheless proved useful insofar as they corroborated my own.

A second gap in the literature on German-Jewish exile, and particularly in film history, is the role of refugee organisations in Hollywood’s émigré community. This includes the involvement of women in these organisations which, as became apparent during my own research, was crucial. As pointed out above, literature on exile has a tendency to concentrate on, generally famous - male - individuals, their lives and/ or their creative output following their exile, be that literature or film, while the impact of the numerous refugee organisations, and the role they played within the émigré circle, has thus far received scant attention. Yet, archival data shows that the overwhelming majority of exiles were members of organisations, founded as a response to the political situation in their home country. Many of these provided fellow refugees with financial aid and came to their rescue when foreign governments chose to turn a blind eye to their plight. Examining these organisations offers valuable insight into the exile experience as a whole, not to mention the political situation in the host country. Evidence also suggests that many exiles were approached for help by refugee organisations. More often than not, the request was of a financial nature, but often also to rally support for political causes. Hence, these organisations were of considerable significance in the lives of the refugees, tying them together in their fight against Nazism; more than this, they were an - often last - link to their home country.

Besides the EFF, organisations the exiles actively participated in during their US exile included the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, the German Jewish Club of 1933 -later renamed, for fear of anti-German sentiment following the US entry into WWII, as the

Jewish Club of 1933 - the American Committee for Christian German Refugees and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. We know but little about how these organisations operated on a day-to-day basis, let alone anything about their members and their influence on the political stage. Investigating these organisations, however, offers the researcher new information on the life of the refugees during their exile, how they interacted, their social life, and their political involvement.

One notable contribution to the research on refugee organisations is Klaus Taeubert’s essay, ‘Im Dienste der Volksfront: Hollywood Now’ (In: Helmut G. Asper (ed.). Wenn wir von gestern reden sprechen wir über heute und morgen - Festschrift für Marta Mierendorff zum 80. Geburtstag. Berlin: Sigma, 1991), in which he discusses the party organ of the Hollywood AntiNazi League (HANL), Hollywood Now. Using the surviving issues of Hollywood Now as his starting point, Taeubert recapitulates the three and a half years - October 1936 to February 1940 -that the paper was in existence and evaluates its significance and purpose. As Taeubert makes clear, the refugees not only contributed to Hollywood Now, ‘which was published at slightly irregular intervals’ (Taeubert in Asper 1991: 161), but one of the weekly’s main concerns was the coverage of events in their erstwhile home country. He highlights the close links between the refugee network, HANL itself, and Hollywood Now, whose chief priority, besides ’the defence of democratic institutions’ (Taeubert 1991: 160), was to ‘raise awareness about the crimes committed within Hitler’s fiefdom [and as such] offered a surprising, today easily verifiable, exactness regarding all areas of German life’ (Taeubert in Asper 1991: 161).²⁹ Hence, Taeubert’s findings underscore my claim regarding the importance of organisations in the life of the refugees during their exile. Taeubert states that, ‘the density of the information network suggests a close collaboration [of members of HANL] with anti-fascists abroad and in the Nazi-occupied territories, and these have never been [discussed or researched]’ (Taeubert 1991: 161). Taeubert’s essay is an important step in the right direction; however, HANL was only one of many refugee organisations. Thus it is safe to say that refugee organisations as a whole remain a field yet to be fully explored by exile researchers.

Methodology: Archival Research

My examination of the EFF relies primarily on archival data, with secondary sources used to develop an interdisciplinary methodology that draws on film studies, social and political history, and critical biography.

While the opening of the Paul Kohner Archive at Berlin’s Deutsche Kinemathek has considerably facilitated access to empirical data about the European Film Fund,³⁰ the emerging picture is by no means coherent. A fraction of the EFF archive is irretrievably lost, destroyed by a fire in the 1970s in the Kohner household.³¹ The Paul Kohner Archive remains the most comprehensive collection of documents relating to the EFF. Yet I was aware from the outset of my research that this emphasises Paul Kohner’s own involvement in this organisation while eclipsing the input of its chief operatives, Liesl Frank and Charlotte Dieterle. To give the reader a picture of the issues involved in putting together an accurate picture of the EFF, it is worth tracing in some detail the history of my own research. The fact that so little had been written about the organisation made it impossible to conduct initial research in a selective way. Instead, I started by conducting a random search to see what my findings would unravel. As the majority of EFF papers are located at the Paul Kohner Archive it was there that I began. Sifting through the documents, letters, telegrams and audits, it became evident that the two main EFF contributors were neither Paul Kohner, who is credited with founding the organisation, nor Ernst Lubitsch, who was its president, but Charlotte Dieterle - wife of the director William Dieterle -and Liesl Frank, the wife of the writer Bruno Frank. While their role in the EFF has been mentioned in a number of publications, the extent of their contribution has never been acknowledged. Visits to other archives eventually confirmed my increasing suspicion that both women were at the centre of the EFF. Moreover, the fact that the names mentioned in the EFF files read like a who’s who of Hollywood’s émigré community, made me realise what a key role the organisation played in the life - and often the survival - of the exiles

The Kinemathek having supplied me with the names of EFF members, donors and beneficiaries, I had a lead enabling me to conduct a more thorough and focused investigation. However, I was daunted by the number of individuals involved in the EFF. As examining the papers of well over two hundred people was not physically possible, I had to devise a method by which to continue my investigation until a clearer picture of the organisation emerged. Assuming that limiting my research to the top donors and beneficiaries would facilitate gathering EFF-related information, I continued by running online searches regarding access to their papers. Lubitsch having been one of the EFF’s biggest donors as well as its president, access to his papers would have been crucial. However, the refusal of his daughter, Nicola, to grant access made this impossible. The Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles holds an - albeit small - Paul Kohner Collection and is also home to the John Huston and the William Wyler Collections, Huston having been a friend and client of Kohner’s and Wyler one of the EFF’s biggest donors as well as Kohner‘s friend and erstwhile colleague when both were still working at Universal. However, neither collection contained any significant references to the EFF. Lion Feuchtwanger, although not a major EFF donor, nevertheless granted financial support via the EFF to a number of refugees, Heinrich Mann and Bertolt Brecht among them, as I had found out during my research at the Kinemathek. This, then, necessitated a visit to the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, which proved extremely useful, as the Feuchtwanger papers not only contained ample references to the EFF itself, but also further highlighted the contribution of Frank and Dieterle. The same was true of the Fritz Lang Papers at the Louis B. Mayer Library at the American Film Institute. The increasing presence of both women in all existing EFF files convinced me of the crucial role both appear to have played in the EFF. More importantly, however, Frank’s and Dieterle’s significance raises questions regarding the relative absence of women from literature on exile while at the same time confronting me with their omnipresence in a refugee organisation. The evidently central role of Frank and Dieterle within the EFF I now took as a cue to focus my research on their contribution. Thus, during all my subsequent archival visits I was particularly interested in all documents relating to their input. These archives included the German Literature Archive in Marbach, the M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections at the University of Albany, as well as the Exile Archive at Frankfurt’s German National Library and the Center for Jewish History in New York, all of which are home to a wide range of émigré collections from erstwhile EFF beneficiaries. Additionally, while in Albany, I had the privilege to be granted access to Professor John Spalek’s private collection of émigré papers. As an exile researcher of the first generation, Spalek knew many refugees personally, visited them in their homes while they were still alive, conducted oral histories, and accumulated his own personal exile archive. For instance, in the early 1970s, Spalek corresponded regularly with Liesl Frank and her third husband, Jan Lustig, also an émigré. Spalek let me have access to their correspondence, which was an invaluable contribution to my research, as Frank’s letters to Spalek contain important information regarding Hollywood’s émigré community she and her first husband, Bruno Frank, were part of and, more crucially, intelligence about the EFF which would otherwise have been difficult for me to obtain.

The Academy of Arts in Berlin and the Archives in Ludwigshafen a. Rhein I visited, primarily, to glean material on Charlotte Dieterle. However, The Academy of Arts also houses the papers of Walter Wicclair and his companion, Marta Mierendorff, a sociologist-turned-exile-researcher. Her papers were also of inestimable help to me, not so much for the documents and letters they comprise, but more for Mierendorffs notes, which are filled with her observations and deductions regarding the EFF, a topic, it seems, she at one point intended to investigate, though, sadly she died before she could do so. Lastly, the purpose of my visit to the National Archives in Washington DC was to secure material regarding the US visa policy in the 1930s, as it is my premise that it was the strict US visa restrictions and the ensuing refugee crisis following Kristallnacht, which abetted the foundation of the EFF.

Biography and Exile History

Since contemporary politics and history played a major role in the founding of the EFF, and given the fact that the EFF was, after all, founded by film artists and aimed primarily but exclusively as we will see, at refugee film artists in dire straits, mine has become an interdisciplinary study that draws on German and US history and political science as well as film studies. Influenced and inspired by Horak and Asper, my approach is also chronological and biographical. It is, after all, our biographies - our background, education and upbringing - that determine our lives and future actions. More than this, however, looking at biographies can be compared to stitching together a vast social canvas which sheds light on historical interconnections by focusing on social networks such as the EFF. To quote Ray Monk:

We should, I maintain, look to biography to provide a crucially important example and model of what Ludwig Wittgenstein called ‘the kind of understanding that consists in seeing connections.’ This kind of understanding stands in sharp contrast to the theoretical understanding provided by science and is, Wittgenstein maintained, what we [are] or should be, striving for (Monk 2007: 528).

As a study of a refugee organisation founded as a result of Nazism, my examination of the EFF, furthermore, not only fills an existing gap in film history as far as the EFF itself is concerned. As we have seen above, refugee organisations in general have received scant attention by exile scholars. Equally neglected by researchers is the presence of women in the broader topic of exile. Hence by homing in on the impact on the EFF of two women - Liesl Frank and Charlotte Dieterle - this thesis fulfils several purposes: While the EFF is at the centre of my examination, this thesis also draws attention to the crucial role aid organisations in general played in supporting refugees from Nazi Germany. Moreover, pointing to the input of Frank and Dieterle, whose contribution to the EFF has thus far been obscured by the spotlight turned on Ernst Lubitsch, the organisation’s president, and Paul Kohner, its founder - my study puts Frank and Dieterle where they belong: at the centre of the EFF. For as we will see in the chapters that follow, the EFF such we know it, would not have existed had it not been for their input. The EFF’s founding was of course, as my thesis will elucidate, a direct result of the apathy of the world at large to the political situation in Nazi Germany and the reluctance of foreign governments to take on refugees. But we still know little of the social history of refugees in exile and this thesis fills that gap by painting a broad social picture of the Los Angeles émigré community, focusing on people who had bit parts in film history and whose lives have never before been illuminated.

In summary, the purpose of this thesis is as follows: first, to draw attention to the many exile and refugee organisations by examining one of them, the EFF. In doing so, I also highlight the presence of women in the broader topic of exile as it was two women who were at the centre of the EFF. My investigation of this organisation demonstrates that women played a much larger role in exile and exile communities than history and literature have thus far accorded them. Additionally, I show how the history of the EFF may be used to highlight the apathy of the international community in the face of the political situation after 1933. Lastly, by shifting the focus away from figureheads of the émigré community to below-the-line film artists, technicians, theatre artists and so on, I foreground those refugees whose lives have hitherto been obscured by their more famous fellow-émigrés. After the conclusion of this present chapter, this thesis is structured as follows:

Chapter Two examines the founding of the EFF, looking at the political situation in Nazi Germany and the US, and showing how due to wide spread anti-Semitism, all doors closed on the Jews, making aid organisations such as the EFF the only way out. Furthermore, I show how the name - EFF - may have been the result of a climate of anti-Semitism in the US. Outlining the aims, purpose, and structure of the EFF, Chapter Two also introduces the two women who are at the centre of my thesis - Liesl Frank and Charlotte Dieterle - and demonstrates how their involvement in the EFF was the defining experience of their working lives.

Chapter Three homes in on donations and donors, focussing on Frank’s and Dieterle’s input into fundraising and fund allocation. Using tabulated data from EFF files, I show how the profession of an émigré in the film industry predetermined whether they would become EFF donors or beneficiaries. Four case studies further examine the motivation and background of EFF donors in the context of their relationship to the EFF and the exile community.

Chapter Four examines EFF beneficiaries by again looking at Frank’s and Dieterle’s role in aiding them. Analysis of EFF files shows how certain professions in the film industry were more likely to be affected by the hardship of exile than others. I use tabular data on beneficiaries to underscore how the reputation of certain émigrés prior to their emigration reflected on the often preferential treatment they received from the EFF. Four case studies of beneficiaries further illuminate the plight of individual émigrés and the role of the EFF in helping them.

Chapter Five investigates non-financial aid granted by the EFF to its beneficiaries. Here, the focus lies on the EFF’s collaboration with the ERC, zooming in on Frank’s and Dieterle’s input in particular. A substantial part of non-financial aid which the EFF - in collaboration with the ERC - concerned itself with on behalf of the émigrés, involved the issuing of affidavits enabling the refugees to apply for a US visa. Chapter Five also examines US visa regulations as well as the attitude of host countries, notably France, towards the émigrés, and suggests, echoing Chapter Two, that the volume of red tape that surrounded emigration to the US was a significant impediment to refugees’ survival.

Chapter Six traces the demise of the EFF. Focusing once more on Frank and Dieterle, I show how the EFF disintegrated as a result of the withdrawal of these two central figures and, additionally, for political reasons triggered by the post-1945 Communist witch-hunt in the US. Chapter Six also demonstrates how the ‘hierarchy of privilege’ illustrated in Chapters Three and Four continued until the EFF’s transformation into the European Relief Fund, until which point a small number of illustrious émigrés - Alfred Doblin and Heinrich Mann, for instance - continued to receive financial support from the EFF.

Footnotes

¹ Rashomon: A film by Akira Kurosawa (Japan 1951).

² Lawrence Weschler is the grandson of exiled composer Ernst Toch.

³ Oral history Marta Feuchtwanger: Volume 3, tape 23, August 1975, Marta Feuchtwanger Collection, Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

⁴ Key works on American film history I drew on include: Alper, Benjamin Leontief. Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture. Chapel Hill/ NC: 2003; Birdwell, Michael E. Celluloid Soldiers - Warner Bros.'s Campaign Against Nazism. New York/ NY: New York University Press, 1999; Gabler, Neal. An Empire Of Their Own - How The Jews Invented Hollywood. New York/ NY: Anchor Books, 1988; Giovacchini, Saverio. Hollywood Modernism - Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001; Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System - Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. New York/ NY: Pantheon Books, 1988; Shaw, Tony. Hollywood's Cold War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007; Books and studies on contemporary politics of the 1930s and 40s I consulted include: Dell, Robert Edward. After Evian (In: Manchester Guardian, July 16, 1938, page 12; Friedländer, Saul. Nazi Germany And The Jews. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997. Kaplan, Marion A. Between Dignity and Despair - Jewish Life in Nazi Germany. New York/ NY: Oxford University Press, 1999; King, Desmond. Making Americans. London: Harvard University Press, 2000; Marrus, Michael & Paxton, Robert O. Vichy France and the Jews. Stanford/ CA: Stanford University Press, 1995; Morse, Arthur. While Six Million Died - A Chronicle of American Apathy. New York/ NY: Random House, 1968; Zucker, Bat-Ami. In Search Of Refuge - Jews and US Consuls in Nazi Germany 1933 - 1941. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2001.

⁵ It is worth pointing out at this stage that due to the fact that the EFF was based in Hollywood, the literature I consulted pertains primarily to exile in the United States. There exists, however, a number of studies which examine exile in other countries such as the UK. See, for instance: Bergfelder, Tim & Cargnelli, Christian (eds.). Destination London - German-Speaking Émigrés and British Cinema 1925 -1950. New York/ NY: Berghahn, 2008; Bergfelder, Tim, Harris, Sue, Street, Sarah. Cinema and the Transnational Imagination - Set-Design in 1930s European Cinema. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.

⁶ In German: '[...] das den Umkreis der Verbrannten und Verbotenen absteckt', an allusion to the book's title.

⁷ Paul Andor's real name was Wolfgang Zilzer, but he also went by the name of John Voight. Carl Esmond's birth name was Willi Eichberger.

⁸ One inaccuracy, for instance, concerns Horak's claim that Lion Feuchtwanger and Franz Werfel had received a writers' contract from the studios, which is incorrect as according to a letter by Liesl Frank to John Spalek, 'Lion Feuchtwanger [and] Franz Werfel were offered contracts, [but] chose not to accept them' (see: Letter by Liesl Frank-Mittler-Lustig to John Spalek, 18th July, 1971, Private Collection, John Spalek, Albany, NY). The reason for that was that both Feuchtwanger and Werfel had a wide readership in the US and thus did not have to rely on the German market for the sale of their books.

⁹ Since 1984, Cinegraph has also published the Lexikon zum deutschsprachigen Film, which is regularly updated.

¹⁰ Email from Jan-Christopher Horak to the author, 18th June 2007.

¹¹ Taylor, John Russell. Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock. New York/ NY: Pantheon Books, 1981; Preston Sturges. London: Secker and Warburg, 1967; Ingrid Bergman. London: St. Martin's Press, 1983.

¹² For instance, the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections at the University of Albany was inaugurated in 1996; The Kinemathek in Berlin acquired the Paul Kohner Archive in 1989, the year after Kohner's death. Similarly, it was a year before her death in 1988, that Marta Feuchtwanger bequeathed her husband's papers and documents to the University of Southern California which has subsequently turned it into the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library. Access to these sources later facilitated exile research, however, at the time Horak embarked on his pioneering study, these sources were not yet available.

¹³ For instance: Ernst Jünger. Paris: Hachette, 1996; Piscator et le théatre politique. Paris: Payot, 1983.

¹⁴ Paul Schrader's Notes on Film Noir (In: Belton, John (ed.). Movies and Mass Culture. London: The Athlone Press, 1999) were first published in 1971.

¹⁵ Aufbau was one of the main émigré publications. Founded in 1934, it was based in New York. Many émigrés including Hannah Arendt, Hans Sahl, and Carl Zuckmayer contributed articles.

¹⁶ One example is Mayerling, Anatole Litvak, France 1935, written by Irmgard von Cube, and produced by Seymour Nebenzal.

¹⁷ In 1931, Kurt Gerron directed 6 cabaret films, Kabarett-Programm 1 - 6.

¹⁸ Siegfried Kracauer, Von Caligari zu Hitler, Frankfurt/ Main: Suhrkamp, 1984 (translation by Ruth Baumgarten and Karsten Witte).

¹⁹ Zuckmayer, Carl, Der Hauptmann von Koepenick. Berlin: Propylaen Verlag, 1931; The Captain from Köpenick, Richard Oswald, Germany 1931

Example: Horak, Jan-Christopher. Anti-Nazi Filme der deutschsprachigen Emigration 1939 - 1945. Muenster: MAKS, 1984.

²¹ Ernst Lubitsch, for example, worked for Warner Bros. as early as 1924; thirty years later, émigré director Andre de Toth also still made films for Warner Bros.

²² Universal had their own production offices in Berlin which they closed in Spring 1934.

²³ Between 1925 and 1927 Paramount and MGM were affiliated with UFA through ParUfaMet, a deal that proved disadvantageous for UFA as in exchange for a much needed loan, UFA had to agree to very injurious screening slots of its own films both in Germany and in the US.

²⁴ Although the team of Pasternak, Koster, Jackson and Durbin collaborated on only two films, Koster directed altogether six of Durbin's films while Pasternak was the producer of seven of her films. Jackson, who would become Durbin's husband, wrote two Durbin musicals and later, after Pasternak had left Universal for MGM, he took over as producer of five of Durbin's films. For a complete listing see: Filmography.

²⁵ The song, 'Meet Me In St. Louis', was written by Andrew B. Sterling and Kerry Mills specifically for the World Fair in 1904 which took place in St. Louis.

²⁶ Louis B. Mayer, vice president and General Manager of MGM from 1924 - 1951.

²⁷ In December 2000, the French media conglomerate Vivendi acquired Universal Studios. As a result, the Universal archives were closed down in order to cut costs.

²⁸ Letter by Liesl Frank to Marta Mierendorff, 25th June, 1971, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Walter Wicclair Archiv, Box 5, EFF files.

²⁹ Author's emphasis

³⁰ Since 2006, the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek has been referred to as Deutsche Kinemathek only.

³¹ Paul Kohner's son, Pancho, and his widow, Lupita, in an interview with me, conducted on Saturday, June 24, 2006 at Musso and Frank's/ Hollywood.

Chapter Two

The European Film Fund: Its Foundation and Background

The Founding of the European Film Fund

The EFF was the brainchild of the agent Paul Kohner. Of Jewish ancestry, Paul was born in 1902 in Teplitz-Schonau, then part of Austria-Hungary. His father owned a printing plant and operated the town’s first movie theatre as a sideline. In 1921, after having joined his father’s business, Paul introduced himself to Universal Studio founder Carl Lammle - who was vacationing in neighbouring Karlsbad - which resulted in an offer that he join Universal’s New York offices. Following his stint in New York, Paul was moved to the West Coast, where he became a producer at Universal’s Los Angeles outfit. By 1932, Paul was the head of Universal’s European productions, and based in Berlin, where he and his wife, Lupita, witnessed Hitler’s rise to power. Lupita Kohner remembers attending the premiere of Der verlorene Sohn (The Prodigal Son, Deutsche Universal-Film AG, Germany 1933/ 34) along with her husband, who was the producer of the film, and noticing that Paul’s name had already been taken off the picture. Upon leaving the theatre, they witnessed ‘a gang of Nazi thugs physically attacking people’.¹ This incident gave them a fairly accurate idea of what life in Hitler’s Germany was going to be like, and not wanting to be part of it, they relocated to the US. Following their return to Los Angeles, Paul would eventually leave Universal and set up his own agency, turning it into the first port of call for many émigré actors, screenwriters and directors after their arrival in Los Angeles.

Although it is not known when Paul first had the idea for what would become the EFF, it is safe to assume that having witnessed the advent of Nazism, he had a clear understanding of Hitler‘s intentions. Additionally, being at home in both cultures, German as well as American, with a fluency in both languages, and well established roots in his adopted country, provided him with the necessary influence to initiate an organisation with the purpose of supporting Jews in their flight from Hitler at a time when the persecution of the Jews in Germany was still misapprehended by the international community.

While I will discuss US immigration and visa regulations effective between 1933 and 1941 in more detail in Chapter 5, it is important to illustrate the point above by briefly looking at the political situation in 1938, the year the EFF was founded.

The outcome of the Evian conference, where from July 6 to 14, 1938, official representatives from 32 countries and 24 refugee organisations, including HICEM and the World Jewish Congress, discussed the plight of Germany‘s Jews, left little doubt that the response of the international community to the persecution of Germany’s Jews was, at best, apathetic. Assessing the results of Evian, the Manchester Guardian commented:

The notice “Jews not wanted” may commonly be seen [......]

in Nazi Germany. One would not for that reason expect to find it displayed at an international conference on the subject of Jewish refugees, yet some of the speeches made at Evian [...

...] suggested that it might have been found in the pockets of several delegates (Dell 1938 :12).

This comment is echoed by Saul Friedländer who, assessing the Evian Conference, writes that, ‘no country, America not excepted, declared itself ready to accept unconditionally any number of Jews’ (Friedländer 1997: 249). The Evian conference was preceded by the annexation of Austria on March 12, 1938 which triggered ‘the first significant wave of refugees’ (Horak 1984: 22).² The refugee crisis worsened following the Munich Conference on September 29/ 30, 1938, the result of which was seen as an effort by France and Great Britain to appease Hitler. As for the US, their stance towards Hitler‘s Germany is appositely illustrated by the following letter addressed to Albert Einstein - then professor at Princeton University - by the US Assistant Secretary of State, George S. Messersmith, sent in reply to a joint telegram by Einstein himself and Thomas Mann:

The telegram of October 8, 1938, from yourself and Dr. Mann on the refugee situation in Czechoslovakia, has been received and carefully studied. I can assure you that we in the Department are following sympathetically the course of events in Central Europe, but I must add that in as much as the decisions of the Czechoslovak Government do not directly affect American interests or citizens we are not in a position to take any action in the matter.³

This indifference on the part of the international community must have had a strong impact on Kohner’s resolve to alleviate the deteriorating refugee crisis. However, it was not until the barbarities of Reichskristallnacht on November 9 had made headlines around the world that President Roosevelt publicly attacked Nazi Germany for the first time.⁴

By this time, of course, the EFF had already been founded and its incorporation was well under way. Besides, even though after the events of Reichskristallnacht the attitude of the international community - notably that of the US - towards Nazi Germany was beginning to toughen, little changed in terms of the strict quota regulations which allowed only a certain number of immigrants by country to enter the US legally. These regulations, operative in 1938, had originated in a revision of the US immigration laws dating back to 1924, when on the instigation of Captain John B. Trevor, they were revised and based on a national origins plan with the aim of keep the ’US population as close to the Anglo-Saxon model as possible’ (King 2000: 211). As a result, the quota for German immigrants - which naturally included Germany’s Jewish population - dropped from ‘61.227 to 23.428’ (King 2000: 209).⁵ However, it is widely known that even this lowered quota was not filled in 1938.⁶ On Roosevelt’s instigation, the US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, recalled the American ambassador to Germany, Hugh R. Wilson, in response to the events of Reichskristallnacht.

On the question of the easing immigration laws, Peter Gay has observed that ‘[Roosevelt] announced that he would not ask for what he could not get.⁷ Public opinion was ill-informed, still strongly isolationist, only too indifferent to crises far away’ (Gay 1998: 145). Gay’s observation is underpinned by Palmier, who claims that, ‘the Roosevelt administration found itself stymied [by] public opinion [which] was hostile to Nazism but strongly anti-interventionist’ (Palmier 2006: 459). Even prior to Reichskristallnacht individuals and organisations nonetheless pleaded with the US government to toughen its stance towards Nazi Germany and to alleviate the plight of the German Jews. Dated 11th August, 1938, the following letter was written jointly by William Weiner and Ephraim Schwartzmann of the Jewish Peoples Committee to Stanley Hornbeck, chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs at the State Department:

We are sending to you an appeal on behalf of our people who are being subjected to such persecutions by the Nazis the likes of which have not been known since the dark ages.

We ask you to let your voice be heard in unison with the voices of a thousand American leaders to whom we are also sending this appeal. We hope our request will receive your endorsement [,..].8 In a similar appeal, 450 Jewish craftsmen from Vienna turned to President Roosevelt in a telegram from 10th October 1938:

[...] In the evening of 19th of August this year the Israelite Community asked us via telegram to report to them immediately regarding emigration to Colombia. We were overjoyed [and] in view of the short notice, we have sold all our belongings for a song in order to raise money to buy things we may need in our new home. We used up all our money, the tickets for the passage were paid for by the [Israelite] Community [...] Now we have learned that the Colombia plan has been called off due to visa problems. Can you imagine what this means for us, Mr. President?

We no longer have any possessions, no longer any home, no prospective country that would have us, every illusion destroyed, no more resources or means of income, all we have to rely on is the small support given to us by the Community.

In our utmost desperation we summoned the courage to turn to you, Mr. President, asking you to help us obtaining visas for any country of the world, where we, as craftsmen, will be able to make an honest living to support us and our families.

We are willing and able to work and also pledge to [...] submit references that prove that we are certified craftsmen and that many of us have been working in their professions for decades.

The passages and entry payment would again be paid by the Community. Dear Mr. President, we urge you to help us, help us quick. We have set all our hopes on you - this great and humane man in the US - who has a heart for everybody and who, perhaps, can even relate to our fate [...].⁹

This plea gives evidence of Nazi chicanery, as well as the desperate situation the Jews found themselves in. It also testifies to the reputation for beneficence President Roosevelt enjoyed, particularly among the dispossessed and underprivileged, a reputation which in hindsight does not seem entirely justified. To quote Penkower, ‘the individual in whom the Jews placed their greatest trust also failed to seize the hour’ (Penkower 1983: 95).

The Vienna plea was of no avail. Nor did it help to amend the US stance towards refugees for, as Zucker has observed, ‘legally, as far as the United States was concerned, there were no refugees’ (Zucker 2001: 46). It is safe to assume that the plan for Jews to settle in Colombia was nothing more than a hoax conceived by the Nazis to allow them to take over the belongings of Vienna’s Jewish population as cheaply as possible. That there were never any plans for Jewish settlement in Colombia is abundantly illustrated in a memorandum by the State Department, dated 10th July 1940:

There is no plan that I know of - and I am sure that I should know of any plan did it exist - to provide refuge for European Jews in Latin America. I might add that this government at no time “planned a scheme” for the settlement of refugees in Latin America [.. .].¹⁰

It was into this political climate that the EFF was born. At home in Germany, the Jews faced persecution and, potentially, extermination, yet Kohner was aware that politicians could not be relied upon to assuage their plight. He took matters into his own hands by creating the EFF, with the aim of helping refugees escape Nazi-occupied Europe, providing them with the necessary papers to be able to legally enter the United States, and ensuring their subsistence in a country that was not their own and whose language they had no command of.

As noted above, the exact origins of the EFF are not known. There are a variety of contradictory sources regarding an initial meeting among members of Hollywood’s émigré community.¹¹ These sources, if anything, exemplify the lack of information that still surrounds this organisation. Frederick Kohner claims that this first meeting took place at the house of Ernst Lubitsch (Kohner 1977: 109).¹² This assertion seems plausible since Paul Kohner would subsequently enlist Lubitsch as the president of the EFF. Not only was Lubitsch a personal friend of Paul’s, he was also regarded as the figurehead of the German émigré community and had more clout than most other émigrés.¹³ Inexplicably, however, the earliest surviving document relating to the EFF, a letter dated October 17, 1938, does not yet make any mention of Lubitsch. It was sent by the EFF initial board members - Charlotte Dieterle, Liesl Frank, Paul Kohner,

Bronislau Kaper, Rudolph Mate, Felix Jackson, and Heinz Herald, to the EFF’s lawyer, William o’ Connor, c/o Button & Mosher, 6331 Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles:

The name of the proposed organisation is European Film Fund, a nonprofit organisation. The purpose is to collect money from all European film people here in Hollywood according to their means and distribute the money to European film people here in Hollywood, now in distress and who don’t earn a living [......] The money will be distributed to all Europeans now suffering under the race creed.¹⁴

Although composer Bronislau Kaper and cinematographer Rudolph Mate are stated as members of the board, little is known about their actual involvement in the EFF. By 1941 the EFF was operating from an office located from Paul Kohner’s Agency om 9172 Sunset Boulevard. Its board of directors consisted of:

The Name: A Result of Anti-Semitism?

A detailed study of the European Film Fund must include an examination of its name, which is curiously non-specific, evoking anything but an organisation with the purpose of financially supporting chiefly, although not exclusively, German-Jewish refugees. It is impossible to determine if the name was Kohner’s idea, but as early as 1976, John Baxter pointed to the ‘vague’ nature of the EFF’s generic title (Baxter 1976 : 292). Taking into consideration the EFF’s noble intentions, it is valid to ask why the organisation opted for the term European Film Fund, when, for instance, Relief Fundfor Jewish Refugees From Nazi Germany would have been more to the point. Furthermore, rather than stating that ‘the money will be distributed to all Europeans suffering under the Nazi persecution of the Jews’, the board used the clumsy expression ‘race creed’ in their initial letter to O’Connor (see above).

It seems likely that this vague terminology may indicate how anxious the members of the EFF were to avoid references to the refugee crisis as well as to Judaism. The reasons for this are complex and manifold. To a certain extent, they are related to the general political situation discussed above, which, however, is also linked to a latent US anti-Semitism which had forced many Jews into a clandestine existence as far as outward references to their denomination were concerned.

Although anti-Semitic incidents, sparked by the Church accusing the Jews of deicide, have been part of Jewish history ever since Christianity was declared Roman state religion by Theodosius I in 381 AD, the term anti-Semitism was first coined by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr in 1879.¹⁵ Marr used the word ‘in advertisements for [his] Anti-Semites’ League, [which was] the first attempt to use anti-Jewish feeling as the basis of a political party’ (Levy 1991: 74). Thus, as Raoul Hilberg has observed, ‘anti-Jewish policies and actions did not have their beginning in 1933’ (Hilberg 1985: 5). Anti-Semitism has been prevalent the world over, including in the United States. For instance, following ‘the post-Civil War period [...] antiSemitism [increased, and] in the 1860s, insurance companies refused to write fire insurance for Jews on the pretext that they were arsonists. [. ] Now came a time when the leading hotels of the country and exclusive Christian clubs refused to admit Jews’ (Grinstein 1980: 141). This prompted many US Jews to assimilate, shed their Jewish origins and to blend in with the masses;¹⁶ to become, in fact, one hundred percent American. In Germany, assimilation by Jews found its expression in a number of ways, the most obvious being conversion to Christianity in order to conform, escape stigma, gain professional rights, bolster social status, win a government or academic post, marry’ (Elon 2003: 82).¹7 1⁸ Their complete assimilation into German society, and their identification with Germany and German culture, would, of course, have dire consequences for German Jews following the Nazi-takeover, for ‘they could not imagine any other place as ‘home’ (Kushner & Knox 1999: 138). In the US, however, assimilation was usually limited to Jewish communities making themselves invisible as Jews to the world at large. This - ‘soft’ - assimilation is an indicator that while anti-Semitism did exist in the US, it never assumed the proportions it did in Nazi Germany. However, as Richard Levy suggests, ‘although anti-Semitism ‘failed to penetrate established American political institutions, it helps explain the callous disregard of the United States for the destruction of European Jews during World War II’ (Levy 1991: 168).

The particular situation of Jews in Hollywood illustrates the prevalence of a latent antiSemitism. On the one hand, despite the general tendency towards assimilation, there are no known cases of conversions to Christianity among the Hollywood moguls; neither any of the four Warner brothers, nor Columbia’s Harry Cohn, nor MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, nor Universal’s Carl Laemmle, nor Paramount’s Adolph Zukor, nor Joseph and Nicholas Schenck converted.¹⁹ And yet, their situation was not entirely dissimilar to their German counterparts. Patricia Erens has observed that, ‘in certain ways, the Hollywood moguls revealed their Jewish roots implicitly, by the patriarchal style in which they ran their fiefdoms and by their close family loyalties. At the same time, these men had an overwhelming desire to prove themselves good Americans’ (Erens 1980: 115), and thus ‘[cut] their lives to the pattern of American respectability as they interpreted it’ (Gabler 1988: 4). To be truly American was equated with being gentile, hence the moguls ignored, if not hid, their Jewish origins as best they could. While prior to the studio era Jewish portrayals on film were relatively frequent, they gradually disappeared as the decade wore on.²⁰ ²1 These portrayals culminated, however, in the Jewish generational conflict films such as Warner Bros.’ The Jazz Singer (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA 1927), Columbia’s The Younger Generation (Columbia Pictures, USA 1929) and RKO’s Symphony of Six Million (RKO Radio Pictures, USA 1932) until, ‘Hitler’s rise to power and the Americanising moguls’ wish for invisibility had driven Jews from in front of the camera’ (Rogin 1998: 212, 213). Thus, although all but one of the moguls were Jewish,²² overt references to Judaism in the films produced by their studios became increasingly rare. Among the few exceptions were Disraeli (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA 1929), and Twentieth Century’s The House of Rothschild (20th Century Pictures, USA 1934).²³ MGM, by contrast, released no Jewish-themed films at all. The House of Rothschild would remain the last overtly Jewish-themed film to be produced by any Hollywood studio until 1944, when Warner Bros. and, particularly, Columbia were among the first studios to address the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Mr. Skeffington (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA 1944), Address Unknown (Columbia Pictures, USA 1944) and None Shall Escape (Columbia Pictures, USA 1944). This hesitancy can partly be explained by the fact that the studios were anxious not to upset relations with Nazi Germany as ‘motion picture companies had large interests in Europe for distribution of their pictures’ (Gabler 1988: 342), which in turn explains ‘why the majors remained friendly with the Nazis for so long’, and why ‘as late as 1938 MGM maintained its Berlin offices with an Aryan staff, years after Hitler ordered such companies to fire their Jewish employees’ (Segrave 1997: 105).

Another reason is that ‘the caution exhibited by most studios in presenting anti-Nazi activities was endorsed by the State Department’ (Birdwell 1999: 21). This policy, however, was reversed after the US entered the war and the Hollywood studios were encouraged to support the war effort with their films. Nonetheless, Warner Bros. was the first studio to openly attack Nazi Germany in its Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Warner Bros. Pictures, USA 1939).²⁴ To further antagonise Hitler, Warner Bros. released a series of biographical films that dealt with the lives of well-known European Jews such as Alfred Dreyfus (The Life Of Emile Zola, Warner Bros. Pictures, USA 1937), Dr. Paul Ehrlich (Dr. Ehrlich’sMagic Bullet, Warner Bros. Pictures, USA 1940) and Paul Julius Reuter (A Dispatch From Reuter’s, Warner Bros. Pictures, USA 1940). However, the references to the main characters’ Jewish roots in these films are extremely cursory. Eric J. Sandeen thus describes The Life Of Emile Zola as:

A widely praised film [which] skirted the fact that Dreyfus, whose case represented the inevitable climax of the film, was a Jew (Sandeen 1979: 72).

Zola's director, William Dieterle, remembered in his last interview that, ‘we could only use the word Jew three times and I think two of them were cut out’. Moreover, ‘the French banned that picture’ (Flinn 1975: 23). Thus, after the 1920s, which Patricia Erens calls the ‘the golden age for Jewish images’ (Erens 1980: 120), references to Judaism and Jewish-themed films, including those dealing with Nazi anti-Semitism, were rare in the US - indeed in world cinema - until well after 1945 (see: Sandeen 1979: 72). Ironically, it was Darryl F. Zanuck, the only gentile among the moguls, who produced Gentlemen’s Agreement (20th Century Fox, USA 1947), dealing with the issue of anti-Semitism in the US. However, even though one would imagine that the newly revealed atrocities of the Holocaust had made anti-Semitism a particularly relevant topic to address, the reaction of Zanuck’s fellow studio heads makes plain that Jewish-themed films were considered taboo in a Hollywood where fears abounded that they might undermine the moguls’ gentile façade. According to George F. Custen, ‘Both Louis B. Mayer and Sam Goldwyn, called [Darryl F. Zanuck], advising him not to do [Gentlemen‘s Agreement], ‘Why rock the boat? Why bring up an unpleasant, controversial subject on the screen?’ (Custen 1997: 294).²⁵

Although the moguls’ aversion towards Jewish-themed films was born out of the desire to assimilate which, in turn, was the result of widespread, latent anti-Semitism in the US, it should be stressed that this anti-Semitism had little in common with its German counterpart, for while it was officially deemed un-American in the US, in Nazi Germany anti-Semitism was an integral part of Nazi ideology, expressing itself in state-sanctioned brutality against Jews. In the US, anti-Semitism manifested itself in a more subtle way, such as, for instance in ‘Jews being excluded from the best schools’ (Gabler 1998: 272) and the fact that as a policy ’the leading hotels of the country and exclusive Christian clubs refused to admit Jews’ (Grinstein 1980: 141). Mention must also be made of Henry Ford, who in 1919 acquired the newspaper Dearborn Independent, which by 1925 had a circulation of 900, 000, and used it to spread anti-Semitic propaganda. This included, for instance, rehashing the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which, ‘for several weeks running [...] came under detailed, wholly sympathetic scrutiny’ (Levy 1991: 167).²⁶ Furthermore, Ford claimed that, ‘Jews, at best, merely exploited what was essentially Christian’ (Carr 2001: 86).

Following the Nazi-takeover, anti-Semitism also intensified in the US. Hyman B. Grinstein has observed that ‘the rise of Hitler in Germany brought new anti-Semitic activities in the United States’ (Grinstein 1980: 144). A survey conducted in the US during WWII revealed that, ‘Americans distrusted Jews more than any European group with the sole exception of Italians’ (Gabler 1988: 345). Father Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest, capitalised on that mistrust when he used his own radio station to fulminate against the Jews, arguing after the outbreak of WWII that, ‘America should imitate Nazi Germany and remove all Jews from public service as a precaution against America‘s entry into the conflict’ (Birdwell 1999: 39). It is also important to mention in this context the role of the German-American Bund, an organisation that grew out of Friends of the New Germany. The Bund was one of several German heritage groups in the US, but was the only one to openly spread Nazi ideology. Although its membership is believed never to have exceeded 25,000, a rally of the Bund, held in New York’s Madison Square Garden, nevertheless attracted 20,000 people (see: Carr 2001: 111; Sandeen 1979: 78). Walter Wicclair writes in his autobiography that, ‘the German-American Bund congregated under Swastika flags, influenced local elections, organised SA and NS rallies and tried to convince America that the film industry was infested with Communists and Jews, posing a threat to homes, schools, churches, and so on’ (Wicclair 1975: 131).²⁷

While the activities of the Bund were often openly violent, they were at least not connected to any official government body which would have been ultimately more threatening, as was the case with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Much has been made of HUAC’s Communist witch-hunt, yet its primary intention, when founded in 1937 by Martin Dies, was to identify Nazi activities in the US. This, however, did not deter Dies from also being outspokenly anti-Semitic, as observed by Buhle and Wagner:

Martin Dies announced in 1939 that he had uncovered a Jewish plot to take over America by guiding a mercenary army up from Mexico, meanwhile manipulating Wall Street into collapse [...] (Buhle & Wagner 2002: 98).

In fact, the US right wing associated being Jewish with being Communist, and evidence shows that refugee organisations were closely watched by the government as their actions were deemed suspicious in terms of Communist infiltration. The following is an excerpt from the introduction to a report on more than fifty refugee organisations, commissioned by the US State Department, dated August 8, 1942:

Correspondence of a large percentage of those engaged in refugee work clearly reveals that their activities are in furtherance of, or allied with, the Communist and left wing Socialist cause.²⁸

What is surprising here is that no mention is made of the EFF. This would suggest that the careful selection of the organisation’s name did indeed enable it to drop off the radar screen of the government. Conversely, an organisation with a more specific name - Emergency Rescue Committee - which in 1940/41 closely collaborated with the EFF, came under scrutiny by the US government (see Chapter 5). As the number of refugees arriving in the US kept increasing, America’s right-wing press exploited the political and social climate by fulminating against the refugees, claiming that, ‘the refugees are robbing Americans of their jobs in the film industry [...]’ (Horak 1984: 23). This assertion is buttressed by Krispyn, who writes that a Gallup poll [ . ] found that 94 percent of the [American] people disapproved of the treatment of the Jews in Germany, but the non-committal nature of such expressions of popular sentiment became clear from an inquiry conducted by [ ... ] Fortune [ ... ] in April 1939.

On that occasion 83 percent of those interviewed were against the admission of more immigrants’ (Krispyn 1978: 106).

EFF members and particularly Kohner, who had been living in the US since 1921, were undoubtedly aware of the delicate political climate. Hence, they knew that not only was the inclusion of the word Jewish in the organisation’s title unlikely to rouse any empathy, but that they were well advised to draw as little attention to the actual purpose of the EFF as possible, for fear of a possible backlash.

The EFF’s generic name notwithstanding, isolated hostile responses did occur, although it is not clear to what extent they are related to the EFF directly. Asper writes that ‘[Walter] Wicclair reports of anti-Semitic graffiti against Lubitsch on the county hall of Los Angeles’ (Asper 2002: 241). This small example suggests that opting for the vague term European Film Fund may have been a conscious decision on the part of the EFF board members, which not only shielded the organisation from potential repercussions on the part of the press and the public at large, but also allowed it to escape the attention of the government and to operate with maximum independence.

Aims and Purpose of the EFF

The chief initial purpose of the EFF was, of course, to raise money in order to financially support refugees from Nazi Germany who fell on hard times once they arrived in the US. But before the EFF as an organisation was officially up and running, its founding members wanted their organisation to gain legal status, as this would ensure its credibility and respectability before the government as well as its donors and beneficiaries. Hence, following the founding, the EFF board sought to incorporate their organisation. The Articles of Incorporation were signed on November 5, 1938 in the presence of Welma Rapp, notary public in and for the county of Los Angeles, and by November 22, the EFF was formally incorporated.²⁹ Liesl Frank, in her role as executive secretary, then signed the by-laws containing 7 articles spread over 25 pages. Article 1, section 5 reads:

The board of directors at its election may cause to be issued to all members of this corporation certificates of membership, and all such certificates so issued shall contain upon the face thereof in clear type a statement that this corporation is not for profit and shall further contain such other appropriate language as the board of directors may from time to time prescribe.³⁰

The decision of the EFF board members to incorporate was by no means the result of mere decorum. As article 1.5 suggests, another, perhaps more crucial, reason was that by incorporating the EFF and making it a non-profit organisation, the donations made to the EFF were tax-deductible. As an added bonus, incorporation made the EFF exempt from income tax. The following excerpt from a letter by EFF members Lion Feuchtwanger, Bruno Frank, Max Horkheimer, Thomas Mann, and Franz Werfel to the poet Upton Sinclair illustrates this point:

[...] In case you prefer to make your donation in a lump sum, this will, of course, be most agreeable to us. Your contribution will be tax exempted since we have secured the cooperation (sic) of the European Film Fund who (sic) is duly registered as a tax free welfare institution.³¹

Identical letters were sent to other writers, such as, for instance, Lewis Browne.³² Thomas Mann, too, stressed the financial advantage of the fact that donations were tax-deductible in a letter to his brother Heinrich, whom he supported financially via the EFF:

Since my contribution to the fund is less than what I’ve previously made available to you and, moreover, is tax-deductible, this modus operandi represents considerable relief to me and no disadvantage to you at all (Wysling 1998: 250).

The tax-deductibility of the donations thus presented a ‘most tempting bait for artists and executives in the high-income bracket’ (Kohner 1977: 112), and indeed the EFF board hoped that their fundraising efforts would benefit from the fact that donations were tax-deductible and, as we have seen, stated this openly in their letters and supplications to potential donors. Raising money, was, after all, the EFF’s chief purpose, as specified in Article 2 of the Articles of Incorporation:

Article 2, section A

[the purposes are] to conduct, maintain and operate a fund of moneys from which to make donations and loans to needy persons.

Article 2, section B, elaborates:

To furnish and provide sums of money by or through donations, gifts, advances or loans to and for poor, needy or unfortunate

persons, and to assist and otherwise aid and relieve such persons and provide for their health, comfort, happiness, and general Welfare.³³

While this section opens by directly referring to the EFF’s chief purpose, providing financial assistance, the third and fourth line are ambiguous in their choice of vocabulary. No direct mention is made of the supplying of affidavits or the procuring of jobs, which, as we shall see below were also part of the activities of the EFF. The ambiguity in the terminology seems again likely to have represented a deliberate decision on the part of the EFF founders. Even though neither activity - supplying affidavits or procuring of jobs - was illegal as such, it certainly was not something the US government encouraged. Given the climate of anti-foreign and antiSemitic sentiment, there can be no doubt that the EFF was anxious to keep a low profile, intent on evading governmental scrutiny as well as repercussions from the media and the public at large. As a result, the EFF board members opted for an ambiguous name as well as for ambiguous terminology in the Articles of Incorporation.

Curiously, the Articles of Incorporation also make no mention of the fact that ‘[...] the European Film Fund can only help in cases where artists, especially actors, writers, composers, etc. are concerned [ ... ]’ as stated in a letter by Fred Keller to Albert Bassermann.³⁴ A further letter written in German by Paul Kohner on 16th May, 1941, to Max Ophuls, then in exile in Switzerland, explains the purpose of the EFF as follows:

I don’t think that we’re in a position to do much for you financially since the money we’re able to raise here must be used for people whose life is in danger and for those who neither have affidavits, nor visa, nor a passage on a ship (Asper 1998: 445).

A letter by Charlotte Dieterle to Max Horkheimer, who had turned to the EFF on behalf of Siegfried Kracauer after he apparently ran up considerable debts, further elucidates the aim and purpose of the EFF:

[...] Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful with my lobbying [for Kracauer] with the EFF. The EFF has very little money and is only able to pay out small sums on a weekly basis, meant to pay for the subsistence of the beneficiaries. Requests for more substantial payouts and loans to repay outstanding debts were strictly rejected [...].³⁵

Charlotte Dieterle was admittedly apologetic about the EFF’s rejection of Kracauer and offered help regarding one of Kracauer’s manuscripts, which she believed would make an interesting film and, if sold to a studio, would earn him sufficient money to pay back his debts.³⁶ However, in the EFF decisions about disbursements to beneficiaries were made in meetings and no single member of the board could arbitrarily dispose of the donations, no matter how hard up the beneficiary was - or how dear.

As these last three letters - all to refugees from Nazi Germany - clearly illustrate, the members of the EFF were more outspoken about the purpose and intention of their organisation in their personal correspondence than they could be in an official document such as the Articles of Incorporation. Hence, exercising caution not only applied to the choice of the organisation’s title, but also to the terminology used in all documents likely to be scrutinised by the government.

Functions and Duties of EFF Board Members

H. G. Asper has observed that ‘the [EFF] board of directors changed several times’ (Asper 2001: 237). A case in point is the appointment of Henry Koster, who replaced Felix Jackson in his role as secretary. A letter to that effect, written by treasurer Fred Keller to solicitor Ronald Button in February 1941, is once again proof of how seriously administrative matters were taken by the board members, as Button was instructed to ‘draw up the necessary papers so that Mr. Jackson’s resignation and Mr. Koster’s election will be recorded in the minutes of the corporation’.³⁷ Keller’s letter does not disclose the reasons for Jackson’s resignation. In addition to the volunteer positions on the board, the EFF also had a salaried employee in the form of a part-time secretary, Ilse Landsberg, who herself was an émigré (see: Asper 2002: 238). This position was, as the name suggests, strictly secretarial and included dealing with the daily correspondence, forwarding petitions for financial aid and issuing cheques which, subsequently, were signed by either Liesl Frank or Charlotte Dieterle.

Little is known about the direct duties and responsibilities which the role of each board member involved. In the absence of job descriptions, we must rely on the surviving empirical data - including oral histories - pertaining to the involvement of each board member of the EFF to assess these contributions. Mention must also be made of the fact that board members often administered support - financial and otherwise - privately, or through other channels and organisations. For instance, Paul Kohner, in his professional role as a Hollywood agent, ‘would regularly place people at MGM, Columbia, Universal’ (Eyman 2000: 248). Lubitsch, according to Eyman,‘had a way of helping through others’ (Eyman 2000: 248) by liaising between immigrants desperate for work and fellow directors who were casting their next film. Charlotte Dieterle is also said to have personally ‘invested a lot of time and money to help a[n unnamed] Jewish actor [to get out of Nazi Germany]’ (Mierendorff 1993: 113). It is, however, not always possible to distinguish between efforts undertaken within the context of the EFF and those that were not. All members of the board - with the exception of the only two female board members, Charlotte Dieterle and Liesl Frank - were active professionals in Hollywood’s film industry and consequently only had limited time to dedicate to their involvement in the EFF.³⁸ This may explain why the surviving documents pertaining to the day-to-day operations within the EFF reveal that the bulk of the work was done by Dieterle and Frank, as I will illustrate in more detail in Chapter 3.

Here I am more centrally concerned with the input of each EFF board member in connection with their role on the board. Lubitsch’s title as President, as already mentioned, was allocated as a strategic move to facilitate fundraising and to gain public support (see: Eyman 2000: 248; Asper 2002: 237). There is very little evidence that would suggest that his involvement in the EFF went beyond the solely representative. However, his commitment to the EFF cannot be disputed as, according to Liesl Frank ‘[...] the monthly [board] meetings, which took place in Kohner’s office, were always attended by Lubitsch’ (Bond Johnson in Spalek & Strelka 1976: 145). As President, Lubitsch also summoned the EFF members for special meetings, as evident in a telegram sent to Fritz Lang on 24th January, 1941:

Heinrich Mann will address a meeting of the European Film Fund on Thursday, January 30th at 8pm. Lido Room, Knickerbocker Hotel.

Your presence absolutely necessary as questions of great importance will be discussed.³⁹ No funds will be solicited.⁴⁰

The role of the secretaries Heinz Herald and Felix Jackson - the latter eventually replaced by Henry Koster - is the most difficult to circumscribe as there is barely any surviving data relating to their participation. The role of the Treasurer, Fred Keller, on the other hand, is clear. Formerly an executive at Universal in Germany, Keller was now a salaried employee at the Paul Kohner Agency, located on 9169 Sunset Boulevard, next door to the EFF headquarters. Keller’s position had, by its nature, a relatively clear outline. As treasurer, he was in charge of the EFF’s financial situation, and his responsibilities included dealing with fiscal matters. Keller received substantial support from the EFF’s accountants Kahan, Seltzer & Eckstein. Even though as a non-profit organisation, the EFF was income tax-exempt, forms had to be filled in at the end of each fiscal year and submitted to the Internal Revenue Service. Moreover, as the EFF operated on a loan basis (see Chapter 3) and only waived the repayment of disbursements in the most desperate cases, Keller’s involvement became crucial when former beneficiaries failed to repay their loans, though the EFF was generally lenient regarding loan reimbursement. It was indeed not until the EFF was already in decline, and having considerable trouble raising funds, that, in a very few cases, Keller threatened to sue via the EFF’s solicitors, Herzog, Button & Butts.⁴¹

The idea for the EFF having originated with Paul Kohner, he acted as its Vice President, a role he shared with Charlotte Dieterle. The monthly board meetings, in which the allocations of disbursements were discussed, were held in his office. Given the lack of available data, it is impossible to ascertain his input regarding his role as the EFF’s Vice President. The documentation regarding Charlotte Dieterle as well as Liesl Frank, is, by contrast, extensive.

Liesl Frank held the position of executive secretary while Charlotte Dieterle was joint Vice President with Kohner. The substantial empirical evidence pertaining to Dieterle’s and Frank’s contribution makes it safe to deduce that their involvement far exceeded the exigencies of their positions. Dieterle and Frank were responsible for bringing writers like Alfred Döblin, Walter Mehring, Leonhard Frank and others. to the US in a joint effort between the EFF and the Emergency Rescue Committee;⁴² they dealt with requests for financial aid and administered it if approved by the EFF board by sending a cheque;⁴³ ⁴⁴ and through the EFF, they helped refugees to find work, as was the case, for instance, with Renata Lenart, daughter of Franz Oppenheimer,⁴⁵ who got her job as secretary of Max Ophüls through the intervention of Liesl Frank.⁴⁶ Moreover, although Kohner and Dieterle both held the same position, surviving documents and letters relating to her are significantly more numerous, which suggests that she was ultimately more active in her position as vice-president.

I have made clear that the purpose of this study is to give as detailed an account of the EFF as possible. The status of Liesl Frank and Charlotte Dieterle as the EFF’s chief contributors has led me to place them at the centre of my examination. Yet both women have previously been relegated to little more than a footnote in film history. This, of course, not only applies to Frank and Dieterle but to the general neglect of women in film history, including exile research. As S. Jay Kleinberg has observed:

Women have been 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 [...] (Kleinberg 1988: ix).

Discussing the difficulties of tracing women’s contribution to film history, Patrice Petro suggests that ‘documents preserved from the past offer limited traces of women’s presence, while presenting massive evidence of their marginality and repression’ (Petro 2002: 32). Although generally speaking Petro’s point is valid, in the case of the EFF, the situation is virtually the reverse, as the majority of surviving data testifies to the overwhelming presence and contribution of women - Frank and Dieterle. However, a conclusive analytical account of the EFF does not exist, much less one that elaborates on the input of these two. Peter Gay has said that ‘by and large, it has been men who have written the history of emigrants from Nazi Europe’ (Gay in Quack 1995: 354). I have shown in Chapter 1 how the field of research is indeed marked by a paucity of studies testifying to the presence of women. Yet the story of the EFF must be told through its most active participants, and these were undoubtedly its two female board members, Liesl Frank and Charlotte Dieterle.

Liesl Frank and the Émigré Community

To fully understand Liesl Frank’s and Charlotte Dieterle’s involvement in the EFF we must take a look at their respective biographies. From the little that we know about Liesl Frank‘s life, it seems that not only were her years spent in exile crucial, but, as Andreas Lixl-Purcell, referring to refugee women in general, puts it, ‘exile constituted the central experience of their lives’ (Lixl-Purcell 7: 1988). Being forced into exile by Hitler’s rise to power clearly represented a defining moment for every refugee, apt to upset their lives in terms of language, profession, material comfort, and habits. But exile also caused a shake-up in traditional gender roles. To quote Peter Gay:

In immigrant families women assumed greater power than they had had in the old country ... [exile] allowed [women] to mobilize resources that only few had even known they possessed (Gay in Quack 1995: 358).

In the case of Liesl Frank, her immersion in the EFF meant that for the first time her life no longer solely revolved around herself and her husband, Bruno. She successfully turned a volunteer position in a relief organisation into a vocation, opening up a new world for herself in the process. It can even be said that, in a broader sense, her involvement in the EFF paved the way for her future career as a literary agent in post-war Germany (see: Lustig 2001: 141; Hofe 1975: 152). Furthermore, her work in the EFF put Liesl in touch with fellow émigrés -benefactors as well as beneficiaries, some of whom she had already known in the old country. Thus, her immersion in the EFF buttressed her connection with Hollywood’s German-speaking community. As I will demonstrate, Liesl Frank‘s motivation for her involvement in the EFF was twofold. It sprang from her close ties with the émigré colony, fuelled by Liesl’s attempt to recreate home away from home. Second, her involvement in the EFF provided her with an identity independent of that of her famous husband.

Andreas Lixl-Purcell‘s suggests that ‘for the first time, exile forced many women to formulate on their own the solutions to questions regarding identity, subjectivity, and autonomy’ (Lixl-Purcell 1988: 7). Biographical information on Liesl Frank is extremely sparse, but the available references to her in the existing literature suggest she may be seen as an illustration of Lixl-Purcell’s case. The literature pertaining to Liesl can be put into three categories: first, the considerable wealth of books on exile - academic as well as journalistic - in which usually a paragraph is dedicated to the European Film Fund as part of the exile experience, with pithy comments on Frank’s involvement in it.⁴⁷ Second, there is a limited range of literature available dealing with two of Frank’s three husbands,⁴⁸ the writers Bruno Frank and Jan Lustig.⁴⁹ However, as these books’ main concern is with the the literary output of these two figures, hardly any mention is made of Liesl. The last category comprises a single book, Carola Stern’s biography of Liesl Frank’s mother, the famous actress and operetta singer Fritzi Massary, Die Sache die man Liebe nennt. Gleaning a certain amount of biographical information on Liesl Frank from Stern’s work is possible. However, due to the nature of the book, it affords the reader at best a patchy picture of Liesl Frank and her life. The book gives some insight regarding Liesl’s birth, but it falls short of providing us with any information about her upbringing and education.

Nevertheless, Stern must be credited with making ample use of what little archival material and secondary sources exist. Not surprisingly, Die Sache die man Liebe nennt proves most helpful when discussing