City of Quartz. Mike Davis
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of German-language journalism, Egon Erwin Kisch, had set his acerbic wit against Open Shop Los Angeles. Famous for his exposé of the Colonel Redl affair which shook the Hapsburg Empire on the eve of World War One, Kisch was a prominent member of the Austrian Communist Party by the time he arrived in Los Angeles. His ironic travelogue, Paradies Amerika, echoed Adamic in its savage satirization of make-believe land-scapes and speculative manias. Unimpressed with a city seemingly built only on sunshine, Kisch asked, ‘Will this immense real-estate business end as a boom, as a speculative maneuver followed by a crash?’73
A few years later, after the ‘crash’ – and as the 1932 Olympics riveted world attention on Los Angeles, the ‘mystery’ of its growth, and its excess of cults – the German geographer Anton Wagner, who had relatives in the old German colony at Anaheim, meticulously mapped, photographed and described the Los Angeles Basin. His Los Angeles . . . Zweimillionenstadt in Sudkalifornien (1935) was a monument to old-fashioned Teutonic scholarship; Reyner Banham praised it forty years later as ‘the only comprehensive view of Los Angeles as a built environment’.74 Although awash with garbled pseudo-scientisms and racial allusions, Los Angeles offered an extraordinarily detailed panorama of the city’s districts and environs in the early Depression. Wagner was particularly fascinated by the penetration of the principle of the movie set into the design of ‘façade landscapes’, particularly Hollywood’s elaborate, but doomed, attempt to generate a Europeanized ‘real urban milieu’:
Here, one wants to create the Paris of the Far West. Evening traffic on Hollywood Boulevard attempts to mimic Parisian boulevard life. However, life on the Boulevard is extinct before midnight, and the seats in front of the cafes, where in Paris one can watch street life in a leisurely manner, are missing. . . . At night the illuminated portraits of movie stars stare down from lampposts upon crowds dressed in fake European elegance – a declaration that America yearns to be something other than American here. . . . Yet, in spite of the artists, writers and aspiring film stars, the sensibility of a real Montmartre, Soho, or even Greenwich Village, cannot be felt here. The automobile mitigates against such a feeling, and so do the new houses. Hollywood lacks the patina of age.75
This notion of ‘counterfeit urbanity’, which, as we have seen, was already a cliché in the Menckenite critique of Los Angeles, would be further elaborated in the writing of the exiles (some of whom, presumably, were disembarking at San Pedro as Professor Wagner, maps in hand, was returning to his academic sinecure in the Third Reich). The contemporary ‘adventures in hyperreality’ of Eco and Baudrillard in Southern California, which have caused such a stir, strictly follow in these earlier footsteps. For example, in the German version of his Hollywood book, Shadows in Paradise, Erich Maria Remarque perfectly anticipated Eco and Baudrillard’s idea of the city as ‘simulacrum’:
Real and false were fused here so perfectly that they became a new substance, just as copper and zinc become brass that looks like gold. It meant nothing that Hollywood was filled with great musicians, poets and philosophers. It was also filled with spiritualists, religious nuts and swindlers. It devoured everyone, and whoever was unable to save himself in time, would lose his identity, whether he thought so himself or not.76
But for most exiles the perceived lifelessness of the city grew to even more unbearable proportions once one left the Parisian stage-set of Hollywood Boulevard. Remarque reportedly fled from Los Angeles because he could not enjoy himself during his customary morning walk. ‘Empty sidewalks, streets and houses’ were too redolent of the ‘desert’ from which Los Angeles originally had been conjured.77 For his part, Hanns Eisler denounced the ‘dreadful idyll of this landscape, that actually has sprung from the mind of real-estate speculation because the landscape does not offer much by itself. If one stopped the flow of water here for three days, the jackals would reappear and the sand of the desert’.78
Yet not all Europeans were estranged by either the facade or the desert behind it. Aldous Huxley – part of a ‘Bloomsbury’ set of expatriate British pacifists that included Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Heard, and, briefly, Lord Russell (at UCLA) – relished precisely those qualities of the local landscape that the Germans most despised. In a headlong escape from both war and Hollywood, Huxley moved his family to a ranch in the desert near the ruins of the original ‘anti-Los Angeles’ of Llano del Rio.79 Here, while he searched for the ‘godhead’ in the silence of the Mojave, his wife Maria devoured the astrology columns in the Times that Adorno made fun of. Huxley and Heard, embracing mysticism, health-food and hallucinogens, would later in the 1950s become the godfathers of Southern California’s ‘New Age’ subculture.80
It would be amusing to know if Huxley and Brecht ever discussed the weather. None of the anti-fascist exiles seemed more spiritually desolated by Los Angeles than the Berlin playwright and Marxist aesthetician. As he put it in a famous poem:
On thinking about Hell, I gather
My brother Shelley found it was a place
Much like the city of London. I
Who live in Los Angeles and not in London
Find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be
Still more like Los Angeles.81
Yet Brecht’s desperate ennui was compounded out of strange contradictions. One moment he was complaining that his Santa Monica bungalow was ‘too pleasant to work in’, the next he was promoting Los Angeles as a ‘hell’ of Shelleyan proportions. It borders on the absurd, as Lyon and Fuegi point out, ‘to imagine an original European like Brecht shopping in an American supermarket, or passing the California driver’s test, or in a drugstore picking up canned beer and running into Arnold Schoenberg’.82 (Huxley, by contrast, first opened the ‘doors of perception’ with mescaline in the ‘world’s biggest drugstore’ on La Cienega.)83 By the same token, however, it is odd that the creator of Mahagonny, who in Berlin favoured lumpen demimondaines and working-class conversation, should have shown so little apparent interest in exploring Los Angeles’s alternative side: Boyle Heights dancehalls, Central Avenue nightclubs, Wilmington honky-tonks, and so on. Real-life Mahagonny was always to hand, as was a thriving local labor movement, largely led from the left. But if the ‘stench of oil’ occasionally penetrated his garden in Santa Monica, Brecht fabricated the myth of the convergence of heaven and hell without really knowing what the ‘hellish’ parts of Los Angeles looked like.84
Not all the Germans, of course, spent their time in Los Angeles in existential despair. Thomas Mann (according to Brecht) pictured himself in the Pacific Palisades as a ‘latter-day Goethe in search of the land where the lemons grow’.85 Schoenberg may have resented Shirley Temple, but he loved playing tennis with his other Brentwood neighbor, George Gershwin, as well as the sunlight that flooded his study each morning while he composed.86 Max Reinhart, for his part, boasted that Southern California would become ‘a new center of culture. . . . there is no more hospitable landscape’.87 Indeed for a while the more famous of the exiles could fancy themselves Hollywood sahibs: happy white people under the palm trees, feeding themselves on an economy run by invisible servants. But even the most suntanned of the exiles, including Mann and Reinhardt, woke up to the fact that behind the Mediterraneanized affluence lurked exploitation and militarism.
In the first place, virtually all the Europeans railed against Hollywood’s proletarianization of the intelligentsia. Here the complaints of the Weimar and Bloomsbury groups echoed the already alienated writers’ colony (the Screen Writers Guild had been formed in 1933), and retraced a theme, as I have argued, that was central to Los Angeles fiction. Thrown into a ‘totally alien, opaque environment, where creative ideas, artistry and originality did not count, where everything was tuned to the ways one finds in workshops and offices’,88 the exiles experienced artistic degradation amid affluence. Despite his initial euphoria about the cultural prospects of Southern California, Max Reinhardt found himself expected to punch a studio timeclock like any factory worker – ‘in 1942 he left dejectedly for New York City’. Brilliant, anti-fascist actors of the Weimar theater like Fritz Kortner, Alexander Grenach, and Peter Lorre were restricted by studio bosses to ridiculous impersonations of