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

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Besides those already mentioned, she and Berthold were acquainted with Rilke, Kafka and Einstein, as well as the composer Kurt Weill, satirist Karl Kraus, novelist Alfred Doblin and critic Theodor Adorno.

She was born Salomea Steuermann to prosperous (if not observant) Jews in Galicia (present-day Ukraine) when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Salka then moved to Klosters, Switzerland to be near Christina and Peter, who helped support his mother as she wrote her memoirs, published in 1969. It would be individual efforts such as Salka Viertel’s, synchronized with organizations like Hollywood’s European Film Fund and Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee, that saved the lives of hundreds of refugees during the earlier stages of National Socialism’s twelve-year domination, and which then mobilized to help those refugees adapt to life in America.Eventually she was granted a temporary one, but it arrived too late for her to travel to Europe to see her dying ex-husband before his death. Salka’s letters to and from her husband Berthold Viertel are of world-class literary quality in several languages. The best biographies tell the story not only of the individual but of the entire milieu in which they lived. Etsy’s 100% renewable electricity commitment includes the electricity used by the data centers that host Etsy. And she came of age as an actress on the stages of many European cities, most notably Weimar-era Berlin.

You would not discover that it was Nelly Mann who more or less carried her seventy-year-old husband Heinrich Mann over the Pyrenees in the stifling heat of an early October day in 1940 as they tried to evade capture and certain arrest. Or that it was Erika Mann, Heinrich’s niece and Thomas Mann’s eldest daughter, who risked her life by sneaking into Nazi-dominated Munich in the summer of 1933 to rescue her father’s manuscript of Joseph and His Brothers from the Mann family home, which was then under constant Gestapo surveillance. Moving…brilliant…[Rifkind] performs an act of spiritual as well as cultural resurrection…Like the multitudes who came to 165 Mabery Road, you’ll be glad you met [Salka Viertel].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. Whether famous or not, though, all of them recognized that they could no longer live in a Europe under Nazi rule. Between cities, sons, and gigs, she also knocked out a screen treatment for Hungarian producer Gabriel Pascal. Her guests included not only Sergei Eisenstein and Charlie Chaplin but also Arnold Schoenberg, Christopher Isherwood (who moved into Viertel's garage apartment with his boyfriend in 1946 [4]), Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht, Max Reinhardt, and Thomas Mann. S. citizen in February of 1939, only months before the official outbreak of war in Europe on September 1 of that year.

She typifies the mostly Jewish immigrants who fled continental Europe and landed in Hollywood during the rise of Hitler. Bilski and Emily Braun’s essay about Salka Viertel, “The Salon in Exile,” from Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation have all begun to fill in the blanks. Before long, she brought her sons to California, setting up household in a Tudor-style cottage on Mabery near the ocean in Santa Monica. The émigrés from Germany and Austria included Thomas Mann, Billy Wilder, Max Reinhardt, Bruno Walter, Berthold Brecht, S. She kept giving and giving, welcoming European emigres into her home, offering them a true place of refuge in a world gone mad.

She was a true bohemian with a complicated erotic life, and at the same time a universal mother figure. They were devoted to raising a close family and brought their young sons to the US, who grew up as typical California boys, loving the sun and surf, and successful on their academic and own career paths. With hind­sight, Rifkind could see the impact of Viertel’s hos­pi­tal­i­ty, her finan­cial and moral sup­port, on the lives and careers of so many refugees to Hol­ly­wood in the 30s and 40s. As witnesses to this story, we might ask again: what does it say about our values that we have chosen to dismiss so large and estimable a life as Salka Viertel’s?

America’s own deeply rooted anti-Semitism, the eruptions of homegrown fascism that emerged in the 1930s with rallies sponsored by the Silver Shirts and the German American Bund, and widespread anti-immigrant sentiments stoked by such fearmongers as Father Coughlin were factors in the Roosevelt administration’s reluctance to alter strict immigration policies that had been further tightened during the Great Depression. Not just a good friend, Salka—who was a Jewish Austrian immigrant who only happened to miss needing to flee her home country by rare circumstance—used those powers of connection to bring artists over to America via emergency visas. But Salka had a strong, confident personality and wielded a degree of influence, for a time, in a Hollywood embittered by chronic discord, frustration, jealousy, and misogyny both casual and institutional. The immigration procedures were daunting, for one, war refugees had to have someone sponsor them financially if they couldn’t prove they could be self-sufficient. Rifkind firmly establishes Viertel's unique place in history as someone who singlehandedly comforted a generation of European emigrees who made their way to Los Angeles in the 1930s to escape fascism and the murdering Nazis.Irwin Shaw, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Christopher Isherwood, Arnold Schoenberg, Billy Wilder are but a few. Such vituperation may seem extreme toward a woman who titled her memoir The Kindness of Strangers and who is remembered, if at all, for inviting people to parties on Sunday afternoons. Among mid-twentieth-century America’s most influential women, Salka Viertel finally gets her due in Donna Rifkind’s marvelous, knowledgeable The Sun and Her Stars.