The Sun and Her Stars - Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood

Zusatztext 105249556 Informationen zum Autor Donna Rifkind ‘s reviews appear frequently in the  Wall Street Journal  and  New York Times Book Review . She has also been a contributor to the  Los Angeles Times ,  Washington Post ,  Times Literary Supplement ,  American Scholar , and other publications. In 2006 she was a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. Klappentext The little-known story of screenwriter Salka Viertel, whose salons in 1930s and 40s Hollywood created a refuge for a multitude of famous figures who had escaped the horrors of World War ll. Hollywood was created by its "others"; that is, by women, Jews, and immigrants. Salka Viertel was all three and so much more. She was the screenwriter for five of Greta Garbo's movies and also her most intimate friend. At one point during the Irving Thalberg years, Viertel was the highest-paid writer on the MGM lot. Meanwhile, at her house in Santa Monica she opened her door on Sunday afternoons to scores of European émigrés who had fled from Hitler-such as Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Arnold Schoenberg-along with every kind of Hollywood star, from Charlie Chaplin to Shelley Winters. In Viertel's living room (the only one in town with comfortable armchairs, said one Hollywood insider), countless cinematic, theatrical, and musical partnerships were born. Viertel combined a modern-before-her-time sensibility with the Old-World advantages of a classical European education and fluency in eight languages. She combined great worldliness with great warmth. She was a true bohemian with a complicated erotic life, and at the same time a universal mother figure. A vital presence in the golden age of Hollywood, Salka Viertel is long overdue for her own moment in the spotlight. Introduction The look, the sound, and the speech of Hollywood’s Golden Age did not originate in Hollywood. Much of it came from Europe, through the work of successive waves of immigrants during the ?rst half of the twentieth century. The last several of those waves brought a group of traumatized artists who were lucky enough to escape Hitler’s death trains and extermination camps. All were antifascists; a few were Communists; most were Jews. These were Hitler’s gift to America— prodigious individuals who enriched the ?lm culture and the intellectual life of our nation, and whose in?uence continues to resonate. Plenty of writers have explored the ways these refugees, exiles, and émigrés managed to escape from Europe. Fewer have told about the Americans who had the courage to take them in. Of those heroic citizens, at the top of the list for her uncompromising conviction and generosity, was a too-often-forgotten screenwriter in Santa Monica named Salka Viertel. This is her story.   Salka Viertel was a recently naturalized American when Hitler’s war began, having arrived from Berlin on a visitor visa in Hollywood with her husband during one of the earlier waves of emigrating ?lmmakers, in 1928. She became a proud and grateful U.S. citizen in February of 1939, only months before the of?cial outbreak of war in Europe on September 1 of that year. It was her very Europeanness that had alerted her early on to the growing con?agration across the Atlantic, well before Hitler took power in 1933. She had been raised in a well-heeled Jewish family in a garrison town in Galicia called Sambor, on the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where she’d been born in 1889. And she came of age as an actress on the stages of many European cities, most notably Weimar-era Berlin. Long before the advent of National Socialism made anti-Semitism of?cial state policy in Germany, Salka Viertel was quite familiar with its lethal intentions. Thus after 1933 she was extra sympathetic to the attempts of the panicked human beings who began to launch themselves despera...

Product details

• Authors: Donna Rifkind
• Publisher: Other press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.01.2020
• EAN: 9781590517215
• ISBN: 978-1-59051-721-5
• No. of pages: 560
• Dimensions: 160 mm x 234 mm x 36 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Theatre, ballet; Non-fiction book > Philosophy, religion > Biographies, autobiographies