Liesl Frank, Charlotte Dieterle and the European Film Fund. Martin Sauter
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by refugee organisations. More often than not, the request was of a financial nature, but often also to rally support for political causes. Hence, these organisations were of considerable significance in the lives of the refugees, tying them together in their fight against Nazism; more than this, they were an - often last - link to their home country.
Besides the EFF, organisations the exiles actively participated in during their US exile included the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, the German Jewish Club of 1933 -later renamed, for fear of anti-German sentiment following the US entry into WWII, as the
Jewish Club of 1933 - the American Committee for Christian German Refugees and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. We know but little about how these organisations operated on a day-to-day basis, let alone anything about their members and their influence on the political stage. Investigating these organisations, however, offers the researcher new information on the life of the refugees during their exile, how they interacted, their social life, and their political involvement.
One notable contribution to the research on refugee organisations is Klaus Taeubert’s essay, ‘Im Dienste der Volksfront: Hollywood Now’ (In: Helmut G. Asper (ed.). Wenn wir von gestern reden sprechen wir über heute und morgen - Festschrift für Marta Mierendorff zum 80. Geburtstag. Berlin: Sigma, 1991), in which he discusses the party organ of the Hollywood AntiNazi League (HANL), Hollywood Now. Using the surviving issues of Hollywood Now as his starting point, Taeubert recapitulates the three and a half years - October 1936 to February 1940 -that the paper was in existence and evaluates its significance and purpose. As Taeubert makes clear, the refugees not only contributed to Hollywood Now, ‘which was published at slightly irregular intervals’ (Taeubert in Asper 1991: 161), but one of the weekly’s main concerns was the coverage of events in their erstwhile home country. He highlights the close links between the refugee network, HANL itself, and Hollywood Now, whose chief priority, besides ’the defence of democratic institutions’ (Taeubert 1991: 160), was to ‘raise awareness about the crimes committed within Hitler’s fiefdom [and as such] offered a surprising, today easily verifiable, exactness regarding all areas of German life’ (Taeubert in Asper 1991: 161).29 Hence, Taeubert’s findings underscore my claim regarding the importance of organisations in the life of the refugees during their exile. Taeubert states that, ‘the density of the information network suggests a close collaboration [of members of HANL] with anti-fascists abroad and in the Nazi-occupied territories, and these have never been [discussed or researched]’ (Taeubert 1991: 161). Taeubert’s essay is an important step in the right direction; however, HANL was only one of many refugee organisations. Thus it is safe to say that refugee organisations as a whole remain a field yet to be fully explored by exile researchers.
Methodology: Archival Research
My examination of the EFF relies primarily on archival data, with secondary sources used to develop an interdisciplinary methodology that draws on film studies, social and political history, and critical biography.
While the opening of the Paul Kohner Archive at Berlin’s Deutsche Kinemathek has considerably facilitated access to empirical data about the European Film Fund,30 the emerging picture is by no means coherent. A fraction of the EFF archive is irretrievably lost, destroyed by a fire in the 1970s in the Kohner household.31 The Paul Kohner Archive remains the most comprehensive collection of documents relating to the EFF. Yet I was aware from the outset of my research that this emphasises Paul Kohner’s own involvement in this organisation while eclipsing the input of its chief operatives, Liesl Frank and Charlotte Dieterle. To give the reader a picture of the issues involved in putting together an accurate picture of the EFF, it is worth tracing in some detail the history of my own research. The fact that so little had been written about the organisation made it impossible to conduct initial research in a selective way. Instead, I started by conducting a random search to see what my findings would unravel. As the majority of EFF papers are located at the Paul Kohner Archive it was there that I began. Sifting through the documents, letters, telegrams and audits, it became evident that the two main EFF contributors were neither Paul Kohner, who is credited with founding the organisation, nor Ernst Lubitsch, who was its president, but Charlotte Dieterle - wife of the director William Dieterle -and Liesl Frank, the wife of the writer Bruno Frank. While their role in the EFF has been mentioned in a number of publications, the extent of their contribution has never been acknowledged. Visits to other archives eventually confirmed my increasing suspicion that both women were at the centre of the EFF. Moreover, the fact that the names mentioned in the EFF files read like a who’s who of Hollywood’s émigré community, made me realise what a key role the organisation played in the life - and often the survival - of the exiles
The Kinemathek having supplied me with the names of EFF members, donors and beneficiaries, I had a lead enabling me to conduct a more thorough and focused investigation. However, I was daunted by the number of individuals involved in the EFF. As examining the papers of well over two hundred people was not physically possible, I had to devise a method by which to continue my investigation until a clearer picture of the organisation emerged. Assuming that limiting my research to the top donors and beneficiaries would facilitate gathering EFF-related information, I continued by running online searches regarding access to their papers. Lubitsch having been one of the EFF’s biggest donors as well as its president, access to his papers would have been crucial. However, the refusal of his daughter, Nicola, to grant access made this impossible. The Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles holds an - albeit small - Paul Kohner Collection and is also home to the John Huston and the William Wyler Collections, Huston having been a friend and client of Kohner’s and Wyler one of the EFF’s biggest donors as well as Kohner‘s friend and erstwhile colleague when both were still working at Universal. However, neither collection contained any significant references to the EFF. Lion Feuchtwanger, although not a major EFF donor, nevertheless granted financial support via the EFF to a number of refugees, Heinrich Mann and Bertolt Brecht among them, as I had found out during my research at the Kinemathek. This, then, necessitated a visit to the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, which proved extremely useful, as the Feuchtwanger papers not only contained ample references to the EFF itself, but also further highlighted the contribution of Frank and Dieterle. The same was true of the Fritz Lang Papers at the Louis B. Mayer Library at the American Film Institute. The increasing presence of both women in all existing EFF files convinced me of the crucial role both appear to have played in the EFF. More importantly, however, Frank’s and Dieterle’s significance raises questions regarding the relative absence of women from literature on exile while at the same time confronting me with their omnipresence in a refugee organisation. The evidently central role of Frank and Dieterle within the EFF I now took as a cue to focus my research on their contribution. Thus, during all my subsequent archival visits I was particularly interested in all documents relating to their input. These archives included the German Literature Archive in Marbach, the M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections at the University of Albany, as well as the Exile Archive at Frankfurt’s German National Library and the Center for Jewish History in New York, all of which are home to a wide range of émigré collections from erstwhile EFF beneficiaries. Additionally, while in Albany, I had the privilege to be granted access to Professor John Spalek’s private collection of émigré papers. As an exile researcher of the first generation, Spalek knew many refugees personally, visited them in their homes while they were still alive, conducted oral histories, and accumulated his own personal exile archive. For instance, in the early 1970s, Spalek corresponded regularly with Liesl Frank and her third husband, Jan Lustig, also an émigré. Spalek let me have access to their correspondence, which was an invaluable contribution to my research, as Frank’s letters to Spalek contain important information regarding Hollywood’s émigré community she and her first husband, Bruno Frank, were part of and, more crucially, intelligence about the EFF which would otherwise have been difficult for me to obtain.
The Academy of Arts in Berlin and the Archives in Ludwigshafen a. Rhein I visited, primarily, to glean material on Charlotte Dieterle. However, The Academy of Arts also houses the papers of Walter Wicclair and his companion, Marta Mierendorff, a sociologist-turned-exile-researcher. Her papers were also of inestimable help to me, not so much for the documents and letters