The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

  earned him a place on the U.S. National Censorship Watch List: ibid., pp. 112–113.

  At the Mabery Road meeting were Salka…and Hanns Eisler: Juers, House of Exile, p. 331.

  Bruno Frank and Ludwig Marcuse likewise withdrew their signatures: Stephan, “Communazis,” p. 114.

  Mann believed that the entire German nation was at fault for Nazism: Juers, House of Exile, p. 331.

  Liesel Neumann also returned to New York, having been cast in a play: the play was called Tomorrow the World.

  Isherwood moved into her room across the street…“Only Tommy is nearly always available”: Isherwood, Diaries, Volume One, p. 311. Hans was a night owl throughout his life, reading or working into the early morning hours and sleeping until the early afternoon.

  “about politics, Buddhism, literature, everything…listening very carefully and earnestly to my replies”: ibid., p. 312.

  “the Red composer…with whirring wittiness”: ibid.

  “They were all very apologetic about this…I felt like a fake”: ibid., p. 313.

  Observing the curfew…throwing darts at a board painted with Hitler’s image: I have seen the dartboard, which according to the current administrators of the Villa Aurora is original and was found in the house after Marta Feuchtwanger’s death. The artist is unknown.

  “a specialist in musicals”: KOS, p. 270.

  “To be ‘discovered’ by Reinhardt had meant more to me”: ibid.

  had even influenced…the Third Reich: see Gerwin Strobl, The Swastika and the Stage: German Theatre and Society, 1933–1945, p. 53. Reinhardt’s techniques that were appropriated by the National Socialists included his use of theater in the round, Expressionistic light and sound, emotionalism, and ritual.

  “He once called himself a ‘negotiator between dream and reality’…but he defined the essence of all art”: Thomas Mann, from a 1944 memorial service for Max Reinhardt, published in Max Reinhardt 1873–1973, A Centennial Festschrift, p. 93.

  “We jumped when the telephone rang…his father was dead”: KOS, p. 271.

  “Jigee had gotten her divorce…to marry her right away”: ibid. See also ibid. for the following description of Peter and Jigee’s wedding.

  Salka could barely drive through her tears on the way home: ibid., p. 274.

  “For many years you have given me the possibility…one day will justify me before my children”: ibid., p. 275.

  “At that time, and this is now twenty years ago…Because he needed me?”: Tagebuch, January 1, 1963.

  “Why didn’t I let the house go dirty…made me loathe disintegration”: KOS, p. 282.

  “At the stalls previously owned by Japanese…If only one could send some of it to Europe”: ibid.

  “the social glue that made the exiles into a community”: E. Randol Schoenberg, ed., The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries 1930–1951, p. xii.

  “benevolent connoisseurs”: Adrian Daub, introduction to E. R. Schoenberg, ed., Doctor Faustus Dossier, p. 20.

  including Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ernst Toch, and Hanns Eisler: Crawford, Windfall of Musicians, p. 109, fn 31.

  even writing some descriptions of Leverkühn’s fictional music: Daub, introduction to E. R. Schoenberg, ed., Doctor Faustus Dossier, p. 1.

  Those essays of Adorno’s became important source material for the book: Christoph Gödde and Thomas Sprecher, eds., Adorno-Mann Correspondence 1943–1955, pp. 3–5.

  Mann made use of Adorno’s writing…that featured Schoenberg: ibid., p. 4.

  Adorno accepted no payment for his efforts: Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, footnotes on pp. 216–218.

  He startled Marta Feuchtwanger…did not in fact have syphilis: Crawford, Windfall of Musicians, p. 109; M. Feuchtwanger, An Émigré Life, p. 1068.

  “Wiesengrund should be excluded altogether”: Crawford, Windfall of Musicians, p. 110.

  There were impassioned arguments…he had never intended to use him as a model for his hero: KOS, p. 314.

  “Every intellectual in emigration is mutilated without exception”: quoted in Gerd Gemünden, Continental Strangers, p. 8.

  “To the Germans I am a Jew…for Hindemith and Stravinsky”: Arnold Schoenberg to Thomas Mann, February 24, 1948, quoted in E. R. Schoenberg, ed., Doctor Faustus Dossier, p. 235.

  “it was impossible to conceal from Mama…After a while we would cease talking and plunge into our separate gloom”: KOS, pp. 280–281.

  the visitors who came to discuss the war with Brecht: ibid., p. 258.

  a rival of Isherwood’s guru: Juers, House of Exile, p. 343.

  Alfred Döblin’s wife Erna also stayed there: ibid., p. 348.

  glad to see Heinrich looking improved: ibid.

  His son Tim was a little boy at the time and remembered…always the center of the show: anecdote from a conversation with Tim Zinnemann, June 12, 2017.

  “When the warning sounds after dark…report the fact to the nearest policeman”: A Handbook for Air Raid Wardens, issued by the U.S. Office of Civilian Defense (U.S. Government Printing Office, April 1942).

  “completely hypnotized”: KOS, p. 282.

  “The very fact that their meeting took place…the community of artists, could flourish”: Callow, Charles Laughton, p. 165.

  during a 1936 stint at the Comédie-Française: ibid.

  “I have done enough for you…I cannot do more”: SV to BV, July 28, 1944, DLAM.

  “I haven’t read the script…to know how much damage you have done to Salka”: SV to BV, July 28, 1944, call # 78.916/5, DLAM.

  they did not speak for a number of months: Prager, “Ich bin,” p. 209.

  his slow coordination made him unfit for combat: KOS, p. 278.

  “as far as both of us are concerned…as long as we live”: ibid.

  Now she was scheduled to appear in court…filled her with panic: Juers, House of Exile, pp. 336, 350; KOS, p. 279.

  this was the fifth time Nelly had set out to end her life: Juers, House of Exile, p. 353.

  “such as they use on movie sets”: KOS, p. 279.

  “Heinrich’s unhappy wife, who had brought him a lot of trouble”: Juers, House of Exile, p. 353.

  insisting that Nelly appeal to her own relatives in America to act as her sponsors: ibid., p. 297.

  Klaus Mann, then serving in Italy: ibid., p. 350.

  “She should have stayed in Germany with people of her own kind”: ibid.

  “We were together, she and I, and now I’m alone”: ibid., p. 356.

  “But even those she shocked had no doubts about her devotion to her husband”: KOS, p. 249.

  “Nelly’s death was the last, sad event of this depressing year”: ibid., p. 280.

  Ruth Berlau…also as a paying guest: ibid., p. 282.

  “it was fun”: Sonya Schulberg O’Sullivan to Ad Schulberg, April 6, 1945, courtesy of Christine O’Sullivan.

  “I’m particularly impressed with her handling of her terribly bad luck…and scrubs the kitchen floor as if she enjoyed it”: Sonya Schulberg O’Sullivan to Ad Schulberg, March 20, 1945, courtesy of Christine O’Sullivan.

  Peter had finished his officer training…a second lieutenant: P. Viertel, Dangerous Friends, p. 12.

  where his language skills enhanced his service in tactical intelligence operations: ibid., p. 105.

  Peter’s letters home described the wholesale destruction as the Allies bombed Dresden, American troops crossed the Rhine, and the Russians marched into Berlin: KOS, p. 282.

  “The well-known streets were now a bloody, senseless battlefield…bloody dogs were still on the loose”: ibid., p. 283.

  “I had never seen him so happy”: ibid.

  Jigee and Vicky came to join the household when Peter left: ibid., p. 288.

  “combat fatigue”
: ibid., p. 282.

  “I know we are winning the war…but it is as if one had suffered a great personal loss”: ibid.

  Brecht tried to cheer up Salka…to justify their high salaries”: ibid., p. 283.

  “At the end I had to speak…Garbo came and was much noticed but not bothered”: ibid., p. 286.

  At some point before June 1945, Salka accepted a donation of two hundred dollars: Sauter, Frank, Dieterle, and the European Film Fund, pp. 150, 202.

  “He’d been among the most stalwart of the exiles…and had remained a faithful champion of refugee causes”: Bedford, Aldous Huxley, pp. 281–282.

  “was comforted by the thought that he had lived long enough to see the crumbling of the Nazi power”: KOS, p. 288.

  “a well-made bad book”: quoted by John Simon in review of Jungk, Franz Werfel, New York Times, April 29, 1990.

  Salka was glad to see that Werfel…had survived to see the Germans surrender: KOS, p. 288.

  “had not been evident in the fates of his fellow writers who, almost without exception, lived at subsistence level”: Jungk, Franz Werfel, p. 201.

  “I find it disgusting…What a monstrous self-adoration Alma has!”: Tagebuch, July 22, 1960, DLAM.

  “among them my own friends…we try to cope with the sins of the past and their reverberations upon the present”: KOS, p. 289.

  9: UN-AMERICANS

  “The ultimate logic of racism is genocide”: Martin Luther King Jr., “The Other America,” speech given at Grosse Pointe High School, Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, on March 14, 1968. Transcript available at www.gphistorical.org

  “The Nuremberg Trials were coming to an end…haunted me in sleepless nights”: KOS, p. 294.

  “but as we are living in a rented place I could not do it…I have not heard from him again”: ibid.

  “The German word ‘Aktion’…that Dusko was alive”: KOS, p. 295.

  An Aktion was the National Socialists’ name…to slave-labor or death camps: Jewish Virtual Library, Holocaust Memorial Center, Zekelman Family Campus, “Aktion.”

  In Sambor all those efforts had occurred at regular intervals…and many suffered from hunger and typhus: Yizkor Books, New York Public Library, “Sambir,” p. xxxix. See also www.wikipedia.com, “Sambor Ghetto.”

  In the early morning hours the Gestapo hounded thousands of screaming Jews to the sports square near the railway station: Numbers here vary depending on sources and the definitive numbers may never be known. According to www.deathcamps.org/belzec/galiciatransportlist.html, 6,000 Jews from the county of Sambor, Stary Sambor, Felsztyn, Chyrow, and Strzylki were sent from the sports square on railway trains to Bełżyce. The NYPL Yizkor Books on Sambir say variously “some four thousand” and “some thousand people,” while Yitzhak Arad’s 1987 work, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps (Indiana University Press), says 4,000.

  The second Aktion,…with another several thousand Jews forcibly removed to Bełżyce: Again, the numbers differ. According to Yitzhak Arad’s Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, the second Aktion involved 2,000 Jews on October 17 and 18, with another 2,000 on October 22; the Yizkor Books for Sambir say “thousands” and “about two thousand.”

  On April 14, they brought somewhere around twelve hundred Jews: Numbers are variable according to sources. The Yizkor Books say variously 1,000; 1,200 in April and “over a thousand Jews” in May; other sources say 1,200 or 1,500.

  The trucks arrived at a wood…where all the Jews were shot and killed: NYPL Yizkor Books, Sambir.

  In a 1931 census, Jews had comprised nearly 29 percent of the population of Sambor: Of the 21,923 total population, the census counted 6,274 Jews, 1,338 ethnic Ukrainians, 1,564 ethnic Ruthenians, and 13,575 ethnic Poles.

  In the early years of the twentieth century…the Jewish orphans of the town continued to be accepted into the city orphanage: Details of Sambor’s history and of Josef Steuermann’s efforts as mayor are from Yizkor Books, NYPL, “Sambir,” p. xvii.

  Before the war, Salka’s brother Dusko had been a star player…on the Polish team: ibid., p. xxvi.

  “I wrote her…that she had allied herself with murderers and torturers”: KOS, p. 295.

  In 1938, Fred Zinnemann’s parents…killed in Auschwitz: conversation with Tim Zinnemann.

  Alfred Döblin learned…including his mother: Sauter, Frank, Dieterle, and the European Film Fund, p. 193. Information about Franz Waxman’s brother and Billy Wilder’s family is from Daniel Bernardi, ed., Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, p. 49.

  “How can one possibly stand what has been stood by millions and millions of suffering people?”…left California to seek psychiatric treatment in Illinois: Crawford, Windfall of Musicians, p. 147.

  On the evening in 1942 after Salka had first learned from the Molotov Report: KOS, p. 269.

  Called “I, the Survivor,”…his loved ones were dead: ibid., p. 240. Salka quotes the poem in the original German.

  “I don’t want to cook or wash for strangers again…Oh, how I would like to have two hours without worrying about anybody”: SV to BV, December 20, 1945, call # 78.916/9 and 1945 undated, call # 78.916/10, DLAM.

  she could no longer write to Rose in Buenos Aires or Edward in New York: KOS, p. 295.

  Salka had to shout to make sure she understood: SV to BV, January 23, 1947, call # 78.917/4, DLAM.

  Peter had been demobilized: P. Viertel, Dangerous Friends, p. 14; KOS, p. 288.

  accompanied by a good friend of Irwin’s, the Hungarian photographer Robert Capa: KOS, p. 288.

  “were united in a common front against the European regular guests…a flippant remark that provoked only polite laughter at the tea table”: P. Viertel, Dangerous Friends, p. 60.

  “my great joy”: SV to BV, December 20, 1945, call # 78.916/9, DLAM.

  Vicky entertained herself…in different languages: Vicky Schulberg’s recollections of her life on Mabery Road are from a conversation dated July 20, 2014.

  They found a parcel of nine acres…with Vicky by her side holding handfuls of nails: P. Viertel, Dangerous Friends, p. 18; KOS, p. 291.

  Vicky ended up again in Salka’s care: KOS, p. 292.

  In Switzerland Peter and Jigee learned to ski: P. Viertel, Dangerous Friends, pp. 3–4.

  Tommy had gone off to college…and eager to spend his holidays with him: KOS, p. 290.

  Dorothy Thompson’s Twin Farms in South Pomfret, Vermont: BV to Virginia Viertel, July 8, 1944, courtesy of Christine O’Sullivan.

  Isherwood moved into Salka’s garage apartment…as he loved having sex outside: Isherwood, Lost Years: A Memoir, 1945–1951, p. 70.

  “Salka was always glad to see you,” and the following anecdote about Garbo: ibid., pp. 71–72.

  “thus reviving…the old Wychylowka breakfast tradition”: KOS, p. 291.

  In 1946–1947 alone…“Work is a habit and she lost it”: McGilligan, George Cukor, p. 182.

  she immediately hired a Viennese woman…she also hired a gardener: KOS, p. 293.

  “a strong and simple story”: ibid.

  So it wedged Deep Valley into its already bustling schedule: www.tcm.com/this-month/article/159662%7C0/Deep-Valley.html.

  Blanke was keen on Deep Valley: “Production Notes for Deep Valley,” Warner Bros. Archives.

  “very nice but deadly boring”: SV to BV, 1945, call # 78.916/10, DLAM.

  “This is practically a first draft…on improving it all the way through”: Henry Blanke to Jack Warner, Interoffice Memo, May 31, 1946, Warner Bros. Archives.

  “Blanke is nice and not hurrying me”: SV to BV, March 14, 1946, call # 78.917/1, DLAM.

  Again it’s impossible to determine…“Would reward notices for Folsom escapees be posted in a small-town post offi
ce?”: Deep Valley #669, folder 8056, Warner Bros. Archives.

  “only goes from week to week”…a lien of six thousand dollars on her salary for tax debts: SV to BV, August 16, 1946, call # 78.917/4, DLAM.

  “will not do anything that requires any courage…is also no pleasure but a big star here in the studio”: ibid.

  “work in the studio was pleasant”: KOS, p. 293.

  Deep Valley was his sixty-eighth production for the studio…until 1961: “Production Notes for Deep Valley,” Warner Bros. Archives.

  William Dieterle, a friend from his Berlin theater days: Gemünden, Continental Strangers, p. 203, fn 9.

  Through affidavits, Dieterle was instrumental…the coordinating force behind the European Film Fund: ibid., p. 203, fn 11.

  And Blanke was a significant benefactor to the fund…and June 1945: Sauter, Frank, Dieterle, and the European Film Fund, p. 110.

  When the EFF reinvented itself after the war…and raised money to help insolvent refugees in the U.S. to return to Europe: ibid., p. 252.

  “They were the descendants of pioneers…long since discarded by the world outside”: Dan Totheroh, Deep Valley, p. 2.

  “I’ve worked 14-16 hours a day in the last 3 years…I am simply dead tired”: SV to BV, January 23, 1947, DLAM.

  “rocked to sleep by the waves”…“That room in which I have been so miserable and so happy…This and Wychylowka”: Tagebuch, August 27, 1962, DLAM.

  “the entrancing, velvety quality of a dream world brought to life”: David Thomson, “Jean Negulesco,” New Biographical Dictionary of Film, p. 699.

  It was he who so memorably incorporated the “Marseillaise”…along with “As Time Goes By”: Noah Isenberg, We’ll Always Have Casablanca, p. 194.

  Max Steiner was so busy in the 1940s…finishing both projects in six weeks: Peter Wegele, Max Steiner: Composing, Casablanca, and the Golden Age of Film Music, p. 76.

  “European and American cultures have always been a two-way interchange”: Clive James, review of Joseph Horowitz, Artists in Exile: How Refugees From Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts, Times Literary Supplement, July 9, 2008.