The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  At Metro, conflicts over The Twin Sister continued. The Breen office demanded rewrites for a scene suggesting premarital sex, but the new pages drifted in so piecemeal from the writers that the PCA could not make a judgment. Eventually it approved an incomplete script. Filming was scheduled to begin in June and Garbo was impatient to get things going so as to be finished with it as soon as possible. “Nobody’s heart was in it,” her biographer Barry Paris wrote. Gottfried would come home to Mabery Road from the studio, where he’d been arguing all day with director George Cukor and with Salka. There he would argue with Peter against enlisting for the war in Canada. “If the war comes here, I won’t try to dodge,” he said to Peter, who was then twenty-one to Gottfried’s thirty. “But why should I run after it over there? People talk about the Jews. The Jews! The Jews! The Jews have to fight Hitler! I tell you, the Jews have done enough against Hitler already. Let the others do something. Don’t be such a sucker!”

  Salka never thought she had done enough to fight Hitler. Her attention was fixed on helping her mother and many more of her friends to emigrate, and on the needs of the refugees who had already managed to arrive. Berthold wrote to Salka from New York, wondering how she was able to work under the circumstances. Isherwood, who was working with the local Quakers in their refugee relief work, observed: “You can’t only help people, like a Lady Bountiful, from ten to four. If you want to be of any real use, you must share your life with them. Otherwise, it’s probably better to avoid them, and subscribe to charities.”

  With his usual incisiveness, Isherwood was onto something, attuned as always to the shortcomings and hypocrisies of his own character. It’s hard to imagine he wasn’t comparing himself here with Salka, who in fact was fully committed to sharing her already busy life with refugees. But being Lady Bountiful had its costs. Stretched between Gottfried, her children, and the legions that depended on her, Salka couldn’t possibly please them all.

  Birthday Party

  Heinrich Mann’s seventieth birthday was approaching, and there were many lively arguments among the Los Angeles exiles about how best to commemorate it. In a restaurant or a private home? Whom to include and whom to drop from the unwieldy guest list? The day of honor, March 27, came and went, because Heinrich’s younger brother Thomas Mann was out of town. He was receiving yet another ceremonial doctorate and giving lectures in Berkeley and would not return until the end of April. Still, the German colony was determined to mark the occasion, even after the fact. Strenuous negotiations continued.

  In the end Salka offered her house, after calling Berthold in New York to get his assent. And in the end, on the Friday evening of May 2, 1941, her house was where the party took place. We don’t know why the community chose Mabery Road over a tonier address—Liesl Frank’s or Charlotte Dieterle’s, for instance—but it was probably the least contentious choice among the colony’s discordant factions.

  For his part, Heinrich Mann was alarmed by all the fuss. “I’d rather you didn’t speak about my birthday,” he had written to Thomas in February. “The number, meanwhile, is too high to be mentioned, especially for a writer for whose job the younger natives are waiting.” These were the justifiable fears of an old man looking over his shoulder—fears that were heightened by the trauma of his flight from the Gestapo, and compounded now as he struggled to restart his life as a writer in a foreign language and on a strange continent where he, once so famous, was humiliatingly unknown.

  Thomas Mann, in the meantime, was lavishly feted everywhere he traveled in America. He had just spent two days visiting personally with President Roosevelt at the White House. He was enjoying a particularly fertile period in his writing life and was soon to complete the finest work of his career, his Joseph tetralogy. Both Heinrich and Thomas profoundly appreciated the gift of being alive after the expulsion from their stolen homeland, where the hoodlum regime loudly continued to wish them dead. But the fortunes of the exiled brothers, born four years apart and locked in a lifelong competition fueled equally by reverence and resentment, had never seen so wide a gap.

  The Germans in Los Angeles often played the game of debating which of the Mann brothers was the greater writer. The brothers’ rivalry had begun long ago, when they were children in the 1870s, with the unoriginal sin of vying for their mother’s attention. Thomas and Heinrich had been raised in the stolid old Hanseatic port city in the north of Germany called Lübeck, which was encircled by a river called the Trave. They were the eldest of the five children of a wealthy grain merchant who had become a senator at age thirty-six. The father’s hopes that his sons might follow him into the grain-importing business were quickly dashed. Early on, both Heinrich and Thomas elected to dwell in the artistic world of their mother, Julia da Silva-Bruhns Mann, rather than in the world of commerce inhabited by their father. “I sat in a corner and watched my father and mother as though I were choosing between them, deciding whether life would best be spent in the dream world of the senses or in deed and power,” wrote Thomas. “And my eyes rested finally on the quiet features of my mother.”

  As little boys they watched bashfully as their mother presided over Thursday salons in the ballroom of the family home and gracefully encouraged conversation among her guests about literature, music, and art. On other evenings, both boys snuggled close to Julia Mann as she read them fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault. She also filled them full of stories from her earliest childhood that must have seemed as fanciful to the little Lübeckers as any of the fairy tales she recited. She was the daughter of a German-born planter and his Portuguese-Creole-Brazilian wife and had been raised in the tropical lushness of the Costa Verde in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro state, where her maternal family had lived for three generations. Her memories teemed with monkeys and parrots and boa constrictors and rang with the songs of the slaves on the plantation.

  The tales the Mann boys heard in their mother’s mellifluous, saudade-tinged voice became the seeds for their art as they rejected their father’s path of “deed and power” to pursue careers in literature. To the end of his life, Thomas never lost his faith in what he called the “primal simplicity of the fairy tale.” He insisted that he undertook in all his novels and stories merely to dream—up to and including his latest work, about the biblical Joseph, with its fairy-tale themes of sibling betrayals, forgiveness, and, yes, exile. Similarly, Heinrich admitted, “There is no sharp boundary in my memory between children’s games and the practice of art.”

  Now in their sixties, these renowned models of dignity and decorum had not abandoned their childhood selves, not at all. Yes, their external appearances were rigid with responsibility: Bertolt Brecht referred to Thomas Mann as “the Starched Collar.” But internally they grew ever more playful, inventive, ironic. “He looks wonderfully young for his age,” Christopher Isherwood had noted of Thomas Mann when he first met him in July 1940, “perhaps because, as a boy, he was elderly and staid.” The brothers shared a ritualistic devotion to their birthdays, which Thomas had once called, in a 1931 sixtieth-birthday address to Heinrich, “the childlike big moments, times of celebration and honors.”

  Since 1925, every five years on their birthdays the brothers had hired a hall, summoned a crowd, and delivered speeches to each other. The declarations were part homage to the other and part rivalrous bid to grab away the attention. As the biographer Nigel Hamilton put it, speaking about Heinrich: “there behind him, his entire life, was a brother who revered him, but stole the limelight.” In fact, when one reads their letters, in which each brother routinely confesses his impatience to receive this or that new book by the other so as to deliver his feelings about it, one begins to understand that they wrote their works in counterpoint, and to a large degree for the half-admiring, half-envious eyes of the other.

  In 1925, for Thomas’s fiftieth birthday, the brothers’ speeches had taken place before an audience in Munich’s town hall. In 1931, for Heinrich’s sixtieth, they spoke
in front of hundreds at the Prussian Academy of the Arts in Berlin, where Heinrich was then serving as president of the poetry department. By 1936, when Heinrich turned sixty-five, both brothers had been driven out of Germany and had found separate places of refuge, Thomas in Zurich and Heinrich in Nice. But they published their homages to each other that year in Die Neue Weltbühne, where, as in all their other birthday speeches, they invoked their childhood years together. Thomas, quoting Goethe, remarked that “he is happiest who can forge a connection between the end of life and its beginning.” Then they protested vigorously against their current condition of exile.

  On that occasion, Thomas’s birthday wish for Heinrich was that in five years, when Heinrich turned seventy, “our people and our country might once again have need of us.” For his part, Heinrich also invoked Goethe, asserting that if Goethe were alive today he “would also have had his house and possessions taken from him; he shares his exile with all of us.” Heinrich went on to condemn the “new Europeans” who had cast aside all pretense of the “essential work” of the development of the individual. “They know nothing,” Heinrich said of this young generation, “which would be bad enough; but they arrogate their ignorance to themselves as a preference. Work on their own improvement, personal responsibility and effort, all of this gets short shrift when they are allowed to seek it by joining together in groups to follow ‘leaders’…they pursue their egotistical enjoyments, intoxicate themselves with subordination, march in step, singing all the while the headlines from the propaganda ministry.”

  By 1941, Thomas’s wish for Heinrich’s seventieth birthday had not come true. The Mann brothers remained among the most reviled of those expelled by the Reich. This time they would not deliver their valedictory speeches to each other in a formal German hall before a large audience, but in a California living room among a bedragglement of fellow outcasts.

  Even so, it was no ordinary living room. No host was better equipped to rise to this occasion than Salka Viertel. No one was more attuned to the poignance and the drama of the moment. In fact, Salka’s triumph is that her staging of this Santa Monica birthday party and her account of it in her memoir have fixed the event in the collective memory more firmly than any of the Mann brothers’ earlier speeches in the august Weimar-era halls of Munich and Berlin.

  With her usual improvisatory spirit, Salka brought the Ping-Pong table inside and added it to a makeshift collection of seating that could be covered with tablecloths and then taken apart quickly once the dinner was over. “Decorated with flowers and candles it looked very festive,” she said. She arranged places for the forty-five guests who, after many disagreements, had finally been invited. Every person in the house that night was an émigré. In addition to the guests, there was the young Viennese couple, Walter and Hedy Herlitschek, who kept house for Salka and agreed to do the serving. Toni Spuhler, Salka’s Swiss-German friend who sometimes catered for parties, took over the kitchen. Also crowding into the kitchen was another collection of refugees who had gathered to witness the event under the pretext of helping to cook and serve.

  Salka had asked Berthold to send a telegram of welcome from New York for Heinrich Mann, and was hoping to receive it before the dinner began so she could read it aloud. Mindful of the current feud between Nelly Mann and Alma Mahler-Werfel, she put Heinrich Mann next to herself on one side and Thomas Mann on the other. “Nelly was opposite us, towering over the very small Feuchtwanger on her right; on her left was Werfel,” Salka noted. Marta Feuchtwanger and Alma flanked their husbands, while “everyone else was seated strictly according to age and prominence.” These included the Alfred Polgars, Alfred Neumann, the Alfred Döblins, Walter Mehring, Ludwig Marcuse, and Bruno and Liesl Frank. All of them, Salka noted, “represented the true Fatherland to which in spite of Hitler they adhered, as they adhered to the German language.”

  Walter and Hedy served the soup. Berthold’s telegram had not yet arrived, so Salka made a short toast to Heinrich. As she motioned for Walter to begin serving the next course, he alerted her to Thomas Mann, who was rising from his chair and pulling out a manuscript from the inside pocket of his tuxedo jacket. Thomas put on his glasses and began to speak.

  Writing about the moment years later, Salka admitted that she no longer remembered exactly what Thomas Mann had said. But, she went on, “it gave one some hope and comfort at a time when the lights of freedom seemed extinguished in Europe, and everything we had loved and valued buried in ruins. At the open door to the pantry the ‘back entrance’ guests were listening, crowding each other and wiping their tears.” In fact, Mann’s birthday speech, which was eventually published, was a thundering denunciation of Hitler’s Reich, a shout of rage against its death cult, its vacuous ideology, its desecration of language, its exaltation of ignorance, its gleeful erasure of Germany’s long-treasured humanist canon. As Heinrich had remarked years earlier that Goethe, were he alive that day, would join them in exile, on this evening Thomas made the same claim about Nietzsche, asking: “Who doubts that he would turn over in his grave if he found out down there what has been made of his philosophy of power? He, who already under the Kaiserreich lived as an émigré—where would he be today? He would be with us, in America.”

  Thomas offered thanks that Heinrich had managed to reach America safely, “that in the last second we succeeded in opening the way for you to join us just before poor, broken France, a nation estranged from itself, was forced by those vile torturers, those defilers of humanity now ruling Europe, to fulfill its monstrous obligations.” He recalled how Heinrich’s literary sensibility had developed through his love of French culture, and acknowledged how “here in this young land you necessarily feel yourself to be foreign. But, ultimately, what is the meaning of foreign, the meaning of homeland? Lübeck on the Trave we left, in any case, long ago. When the homeland becomes foreign, the foreign becomes the homeland.

  “Most profoundly foreign to us today is Germany,” Thomas went on, “and, compared to its fatal foreignness, every foreign place seems familiar.” He proceeded to outline his hopes for a unified world, in which nationalism would have no dominion, in which the “universal slavery” and “absolute cynicism” of Hitler would never again be tolerated. Thomas invoked the weapons against Hitlerism that he believed would ultimately prevail over it—“freedom, truth, right, humanity”—and praised Heinrich for his prophetic political essays which had anticipated that epic battle, decades before the present moment. He commended the “moral phenomenon” of Heinrich’s writings, which, “in their blend of literary brilliance and—I would almost say: a fairy-tale simplicity, a popularity on the scale of humanity,” were the greatest examples of moral expression. Finally, he praised Heinrich’s invention of the doomed Professor Unrat from his early novel, remarking that Unrat means garbage. “Hitler is no professor—far from it,” he said. “But Unrat he is, nothing but Unrat, and soon he will be the rubbish of history.” Addressing Heinrich: “If you, as I trust you do, have the physical patience to endure, then your old eyes will see what you in your bold youth described: the end of a tyrant.”

  When the homeland becomes foreign, the foreign becomes the homeland. How deeply that formulation must have pierced everyone in Salka’s house on that gentle California evening, as the sun floated downward toward the horizon and the sea exhaled its steady soothing breaths over the shoreline. Salka gathered her emotions and tried once again to proceed to the main course, an expensive roast of beef. Bruno Frank and Lion Feuchtwanger were scheduled to speak once the meat course was done and she was hoping to keep things moving. But no sooner had the guests toasted Heinrich’s health than Heinrich himself also rose, put on his glasses, and produced a manuscript.

  As Thomas had spoken of Nietzsche, Heinrich now brought up Shakespeare, declaring that if the Bard happened to return to earth in these times, “the enemy would have to die of shame.” Echoing Thomas’s defiance, Heinrich noted that all intellectual talent, even if lesser than S
hakespeare’s, “is justified in concluding from ancient experience: as long as the forces of destruction are active, so long do we persist in our efforts. We have often survived the late after effects of the destructive and the ignorant.” With the prerogative of his advanced years, he took the long view and vowed that good would outlive evil: “We must preserve the hope of growing older than virulent hatred…moral centuries follow centuries of barbarism.”

  Heinrich thanked Thomas for his tribute and verified the strength of their bond, noting drily that “the bullets that come flying are aimed at both of us.” Acknowledging his younger brother’s superior reputation, he said: “Our life and our thinking have always remained fraternal, and it is not only my birth, but my heart and knowledge, that justify the pride I take in your greatness, your fame—’as if it were a piece of myself.’ ” He concluded with the only other word of thanks in either of the brothers’ speeches that was directed toward someone outside their circle of two. “I rendered honor where it was due,” he said, “and offer it today to our dear hostess. This glass is for Frau Salka Viertel.”

  When the homeland becomes foreign, the foreign becomes the homeland. While the Dichterfürsten had undertaken to carry their forebears Goethe and Nietzsche with them into exile, Salka had dedicated herself to housing them on alien soil. Understanding that this house was in many ways all that remained of their homeland, Heinrich honored the fact by raising his glass to Salka. And Salka, in wordless acknowledgment, went on with hosting the evening. The beef was grievously overdone, but nobody cared. The remaining speeches were short. Before dessert was served, Marta Feuchtwanger offered an impromptu toast to Nelly Mann, applauding her for saving Heinrich’s life by carrying him over the Pyrenees. Nelly responded with several waves of embarrassment, first hiding her face in her hands, then erupting with laughter as she pointed to the bodice of her red dress. Somehow it had come undone, exposing her ample décolletage barely contained within a lacy bra.