The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  Thomas and Katia were regular guests at Salka’s Sundays, where Thomas praised the strong coffee and became fanatical about the homemade chocolate cake. Salka took particular pleasure in the little dramas she created by introducing this or that quivering newcomer to the writer many Americans considered the greatest in the world. Mann did not disappoint. Shy or effusive, each person who shook Mann’s hand received the benediction of his kindly solemnity. He retained, Salka wrote, “the reserved politeness of a diplomat on official duty.”

  While Mann and others gave fundraising speeches and wrote affidavits that summer in Los Angeles, the ERC in New York compiled lists of people trapped in France and threatened with arrest by the Gestapo. The committee saw that it needed to focus its initial rescue efforts on high-profile writers, artists, and intellectuals in order to raise money to help the many thousands of others to escape.

  Thus the ERC solicited names from the likes of the director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr, and the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Its initial list of about two hundred refugees included Franz Werfel, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Heinrich Mann, and was entrusted to the care of a volunteer who offered to travel to Marseille to assess the situation. That volunteer was a preppy young American editor with a remarkably impassive demeanor and zero relief-work experience named Varian Fry.

  Fry arrived in Marseille in mid-August 1940 with his secret list and three thousand dollars in cash strapped to his leg, expecting to stay for three weeks. In that time he hoped to figure out how to transport the people on the list to Lisbon or Casablanca, which were then the only possible exit points out of Europe. In fact, Fry remained for over a year. Defying both Vichy law and the State Department—which rigorously maintained the U.S. government’s nativist immigration policies—he used document forgery and guided escape routes to smuggle more than two thousand people out of France.

  Varian Fry’s mission would never have succeeded without his expertise in manipulating the ever-shifting visa requirements in Europe and the United States. As with Liesl Frank and the European Film Fund, his was a triumph of paperwork. Though there is no evidence of direct correspondence between Fry and the European Film Fund—neither was eager to leave a paper trail, since much of their activity was illegal—their efforts were coordinated: donations to the EFF were funneled to Fry’s operation in Marseille, while EFF members wrote affidavits and arranged for jobs in America for the incoming refugees. In the case of Heinrich Mann, for instance, the EFF secured a screenwriting job for him at Warner Bros. to overcome the “likely to become a public charge” obstacle, and also collected affidavits and travel funds for him. Meanwhile, Fry and the ERC arranged Heinrich Mann’s documents in preparation for his escape.

  Fry had heard that some refugees had managed to leave France without exit visas by crossing the Spanish border by train and then traveling to Lisbon, where they would hope to find room on a ship. “Up to the last moment,” wrote Jean-Michel Palmier, “[refugees] did not know if the expected ship would arrive, and if they would be able to embark, as one of their visas or authorizations might in the meantime have run out.” Nonetheless Fry thought this strategy worth a gamble, and he approached the Werfels, Feuchtwangers, and Heinrich Manns with the idea. Feuchtwanger consented to the plan if Fry would agree to go with them.

  Fry added a fourth couple, the Czech Jewish graphic artist Egon Adler and his wife Berthe. Then Heinrich Mann asked Fry for one more addition to the group: his nephew Golo Mann, the third of Thomas Mann’s six children. Golo had been arrested as an enemy alien after volunteering in France to fight the Germans. Like Lion Feuchtwanger, he was interned at Les Milles and had recently escaped.

  Fry planned to leave in mid-September, as soon as he could gather the necessary Spanish and Portuguese transit visas. These were generally available for anyone who had a valid overseas visa, as the Manns, Werfels, Feuchtwangers, and Adlers did. Their journey would still be illegal, however, because they all lacked the impossible French exit visas. And it was still incredibly dangerous: their success depended on the whims of the border guards, who could be generous or vindictive, inattentive or zealous. If the enemies of the Reich were unlucky at the border, they could expect arrest and internment, and possibly execution.

  Fry tried to keep his composure so as not to cause panic among the jittery group. The plans kept changing, because the laws kept changing. Word came from the frontier that Spain was no longer letting apatrides through: these were Germans who had been stripped of their citizenship because they were Jewish or anti-Nazi. The Werfels and Adlers were Czech and Austrian by birth, while the Manns had been made honorary Czech citizens. But the Feuchtwangers were apatrides. Fry was forced to leave them behind, promising that they could follow as soon as possible.

  In the early morning of September 12, 1940, the rest of the group met Fry at the Marseille train station. The Werfels had twelve suitcases. Most accounts of the story mention the Werfels’ luggage with skeptical condescension: What hauteur! What wifely cluelessness! Yet Alma Werfel, like Marta Feuchtwanger and Nelly Mann, had been responsible for packing up entire lives as quickly as possible, forced to decide what was indispensable in exile. In Alma’s suitcases were the artifacts most precious to her, and no one could argue that they were frivolous. They included the musical scores of her former husband Gustav Mahler, the original manuscript of Anton Bruckner’s third symphony, and the beginnings of Franz Werfel’s novel-in-progress about Saint Bernadette of Lourdes.

  The train took the group to the base of the steep linear ranges of the Pyrenees, arriving just after dark in the border town of Cerbère. Surely the name of the town was not lost on this group: it recalled Cerberus, the three-headed beast from the Odyssey that guards the underworld and prevents the escape of the dead. Fry was agonized to learn that the commissaire’s supervisor happened to be visiting and was not letting anyone through without exit visas. If they tried to take the train across the border to the Spanish town of Port Bou, the chance of arrest was high.

  The group stayed the night at a hotel in Cerbère. The next morning was cloudless and hot. It was Friday the thirteenth, an omen they remarked on with dread. Nelly Mann did not trust Fry. Maybe he was a spy; maybe he would sell them out to the authorities. Yet if they waited any longer, new orders might come in from Vichy demanding their arrest. The best option was for Fry to take all their suitcases on the train to Port Bou while the group hiked over the mountain. Of this scheme everyone in the group was afraid. A fit person could make the climb and descent in about five hours. For these refugees, in the best case, it would take the entire day. Fry did not think Werfel could manage it: “He’s too fat,” he was thinking, “and Mann’s too old.” Werfel himself, who had just turned fifty and suffered from serious heart trouble, had his own doubts. But the determination to outrun the Nazis made their decision.

  Fry bought them a dozen packages of cigarettes with which to bribe the police along the way, and with great misgivings he said goodbye. An American associate of his who was familiar with the route led the way as their guide. “Half an hour later,” Fry wrote, “I could still see them making their way across the rough fields of the hill, following the line of the stone walls, and disappearing now and then behind an isolated olive tree, or resting in its half-shade.”

  They had tried to dress like tourists on a walking trip, carrying only rucksacks. Alma Mahler-Werfel wore a billowing white dress and a pair of old sandals. She and Werfel walked ahead with the guide, then waited while he went down to help the others. The steep, zigzagging terrain was made up of slippery flat tablets of stone. Some of it could be scaled only by crawling. The paths were spiked with thorny shrubs that tore at the women’s ankles and made them bleed. “Mountain goats could hardly have kept their footing on the glassy, shimmering slate,” Alma Mahler-Werfel wrote. “If you skidded, there was nothing but thistles to hold on to.” The mistral was blowing, whining like an air-raid siren and grinding its gr
it into the last of their nerves. The air was feverishly hot. For all of Werfel’s fears, he managed the climb fairly well. It was sixty-nine-year-old Heinrich who had the most trouble. “Not that he wasn’t game,” Fry reflected. “He was the gamest of the lot. It was simply that he couldn’t make the grade without help.” Nelly, Golo, and their American guide took turns virtually carrying Heinrich most of the way over the mountain.

  Some hours later, at the shelterless crest 6,500 feet up, they changed guides. “After the march in the broiling sun we felt utterly wretched,” wrote Alma. Just then, two gardes mobiles spied the party and started toward the desolate little group. They were sure that now they would all be arrested and sent to a concentration camp. But the soldiers only saluted and told them to follow the path toward the Spanish border post rather than the French one, as the Spanish were less likely to check for exit visas. The friendly advice very possibly saved their lives.

  The descent was a tiny footpath, worn down by the footprints of smugglers, punctuated with cactus and lavender. The Spanish border sentries examined their passports with anxiety-provoking care, then finally waved them on. Late in the day at the Port Bou railway station the group reunited with Fry, who later wrote: “We almost fell into one another’s arms, as though we were old friends who had been separated for years and had met by accident in some strange city where none of us had ever expected to be.” There was a subdued meal at the hotel, after which Fry sent a wire to his secretary in Marseille. “Harry can send his friends,” it read—code that the route was safe enough for the Feuchtwangers to follow.

  Three days later the group reached Madrid, and from there they flew to Portugal. In Thomas Mann’s American diary for September 20, 1940, this entry: “Telegram from Golo and Heinrich from Lisbon, where they are waiting [for] a ship. Joy and satisfaction.” Two weeks later, in early October, the group sailed on a Greek steamship bound for America. The view of Lisbon as the ship left the harbor was their last image of Europe. “A lost lover is not more beautiful,” wrote Heinrich. “Everything life had given us had come from this continent.” He had never before ventured away from it, not even across the Channel. Franz Werfel too was pensive about farewells and new beginnings. “Now America lies before us, an entirely unknown continent,” he wrote to his parents as the ship sailed. “I hope that it will be favorably disposed toward me.”

  The Feuchtwangers were aboard, having left Marseille a few days after the others, also via the Pyrenees, with the help of an American Unitarian minister named Waitstill Sharp and his wife Martha. The poet Walter Mehring was there too, along with two other couples who had escaped through the combined efforts of the European Film Fund and the Emergency Rescue Committee: Alfred Döblin, the author of the most influential of all the Weimar-era novels, Berlin Alexanderplatz, and his wife; and Alfred and Lisl Polgar, Salka’s friends with whom she had walked in the courtyard of the Palais Royal in the days just before the fall of France.

  Many others were not so fortunate. Many others whose scraps of paper were arbitrarily rejected ended up in Spanish jails, or were handed over to the Germans, or both. It was impossible to guess which way the dice would fall. That same September, the Berlin-born Jewish historian and critic Walter Benjamin had reached Port Bou with a different group of refugees when he heard that Spain was closing its borders. All of them would be required to go back to France. Benjamin could bear no more. His friend the writer Arthur Koestler had given him a lethal dose of morphine pills. Some have alleged that Benjamin took them; others that he died of a cerebral hemorrhage or an overdose of his heart medication. His body was found the next day. The day after that, Spain reopened its borders and the others in Benjamin’s group continued on through Spain and eventually to safety.

  From Lisbon, Fry cabled the ERC in New York to report on his journey with the Manns and Werfels and to ask for more money. The celebrity of those he had rescued was a fundraising boon. The ERC was able to send more than twenty thousand dollars to Fry’s office during the first four months of his operation. Other donations—most likely raised in part through the European Film Fund—went to support the newly arrived refugees in America.

  While there is no evidence that Salka ever met or had any contact with Fry, they were nonetheless united in their work through the EFF and the ERC. Together they formed two endpoints in an underground railroad. He was the American who got refugees out of Europe, and she was the European who received them in California. Both roles were critical. “Some may die on the way,” Fry’s assistant once said about their work; “Some will never get over it; some will be the better for the experience. But one must get them all out. At least one must try.” There was as much peril in adapting to the new world as there had been in leaving the old, and as few guarantees. Without cultural brokers like Salka, the newcomers would have had no chance of success at all.

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  BY NOVEMBER 1940 the Feuchtwangers, Manns, Werfels, Polgars, and Döblins had all arrived in Los Angeles, and by the following May they were all beginning to acclimate. Different mountains, different sky, different sea—but oh, how like Sanary it seemed. For some, in the early throes of giddy relief, it was even better. Marta Feuchtwanger found the beauty of the Pacific shoreline more informal than the Côte d’Azur. “Here you feel at home in the landscape,” she said; “here you live with the ocean and nature; it’s part of your life.” Franz Werfel wrote to his parents: “The Riviera is just trash compared to this.” He and Alma found a house in the hills just above the Hollywood Bowl, where he settled down to finish The Song of Bernadette. His garden was full of fruit trees and roses that bloomed in every season. His health improved. He felt ten years younger.

  Not everyone was as enthusiastic. When asked how she felt in America, the German poet Annette Kolb answered, “Grateful and unhappy.” Alfred Döblin and his wife moved into a small apartment in Hollywood, where Döblin complained, as Berthold Viertel often did, that “pedestrians had become extinct…people are born as drivers…LA is the opposite of a place I’d choose to live in, since I happen to love walking amongst crowds.” Salka did her best to ease the grumbling, taking newcomers to the Farmer’s Market on Fairfax and the Grand Central Market downtown, both of which could be ambled through like the European markets to which they were accustomed. Döblin found other reasons to despise his new life. The screenwriting job at Metro which had been secured for him by the European Film Fund was a demeaning distraction from his literary career. He wrote to his fellow exile Hermann Kesten in March 1941 that “the people here don’t need our stories, they already have vaults full of them,” and, four months later, “I do not believe one can at the same time serve Louis B. Mayer and one’s own work.”

  Thomas Mann was glad to know that his brother Heinrich’s first impressions of Los Angeles were encouraging, and that his prospects for success in Hollywood were good. There was even talk that one of his books might once again be made into a film, as had his novel Professor Unrat. But the initial optimism did not last long. Salka wrote that Heinrich “appeared an odd figure in the Burbank studio” where Warner Bros., in cooperation with the European Film Fund, had set him up as a screenwriter at six thousand dollars per year. Heinrich himself seemed rather baffled by the position, writing to Thomas about his reluctance to come into the studio “to waste the time between 10 and 1 in consultation and chatter.”

  Heinrich and Nelly were renting a small house in Hollywood and were soon to move to an apartment on Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. “Care for the house and the car fall to my wife,” Heinrich wrote; “everything is doubtful when it’s meant for an uncertain period of time.” Salka wrote about her new friend Nelly, “a voluptuous, blond, blue-eyed Teutonic beauty with red lips and sparkling teeth” and a “ribald manner,” at least thirty years younger than Heinrich and utterly devoted to him: “She drank secretly, slipping out to the bathroom or kitchen, coyly refusing the drinks offered at parties; then insisted on driving Hei
nrich home, to which he heroically consented.” Nelly’s drinking might have been a self-medicating effort to combat a longtime depression, surely not helped by the ordeal of the flight from Marseille. In the years before their escape she had tried several times to kill herself.

  There were constant parties for the newly arrived exiles at Salka’s house and others. If these occasions were festive, they were not always cordial. Salka remarked on the colony’s division into several groups, designating Thomas Mann, who had decided to relocate permanently from Princeton and was renting a house not far from Salka on Amalfi Drive, as “the representative, towering literary figure.” “Hollywood could now boast of being the Parnassus of German literature,” Salka wrote, “inasmuch as Thomas Mann had become a resident of the Pacific Palisades.” In Mann’s circle were Bruno and Liesl Frank, William and Charlotte Dieterle, the Feuchtwangers, the Werfels, and the Bruno Walters. But even here there were fissures: Thomas and Katia were publicly polite but privately dismissive toward Nelly Mann, whom they considered hopelessly vulgar, and there was friction between Nelly and Alma Mahler-Werfel as well.

  Salka had to take great care to see that Arnold Schoenberg was never in the same room as his rival, the composer Igor Stravinsky, who had arrived in Los Angeles in mid-1940 via Paris and New York. This was never easy, as Stravinsky was very close to many of Salka’s friends, particularly Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood. “Only shortly before Schoenberg’s death did [he and Stravinsky] mutually acknowledge their importance,” Salka remembered. “Later Stravinsky paid great homage to Schoenberg and to his music.” If Thomas Mann was the president of this Weimar-in-exile, Salka was its chief ambassador, always trying to soothe the bitterness and jealousy—some of it decades old—that erupted among the factions.