Notable German and Austrian Jews who shaped modern american
Unleashing the Creative Power of the Refugees from Hitler
When Napoleon smashed open the ghetto gates of Europe, it set in motion a great change in the way Jews of Western and Central Europe thought of themselves. They were no longer members of an alien race, but French or Germans of " the Mosaic persuasion." As the German states became the center of intellectual development in the 19th century ( Kant,Hegel,-Marx, later Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein) Jews adopted German "Kultur"as their own.
That identity of "Mosaic persuasion" rather than ethnic or race was destroyed by the developments that began in the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment and the rise of a rabid nationalism, which could not accept the Jew under any circumstances. That illusion exploded completely with the rise to power of Hitler and Nazism in Germany, Austria and had counterparts throughout Europe.
As the newly founded German and Austria Republics started to collapse and give way to the Third Reich, many of the best and brightest of Central Europeans, especially Jews, flocked to the golden shores of California to continue their invaluable work in film, music, literature, the physical sciences and the social sciences , thereby shaping American civilization as it is today.
To understand the background of the Jews of western Europe, go to:
http://www.rabbinorbert.com/2021/06/how-jewish-hunchback-conquered-gates-of.html
http://www.rabbinorbert.com/2021/06/the-jewish-response-to-modernity-after.html
http://www.rabbinorbert.com/2021/06/the-jewish-trinity-that-took-down-world.html
http://www.rabbinorbert.com/2021/06/the-jewish-trinity-that-took-down-world_30.html
http://www.rabbinorbert.com/2021/07/the-jewish-trinity-that-took-down-world.html
http://www.rabbinorbert.com/2021/08/buber-and-rosenzweig-odd-couple-who.html
Music has charms to soothe a savage breast
Creative Artist Found Shelter Here
As the Third Reich tightened its grip on German society and Austrian society, Jews were squeezed out of all professions. Musicians, Conductors, and Composers were desperate to find safe haven.
How Did German Jewish Refugees Shape Our Music?
"It is estimated that approximately 1,500 musicians fled Europe for the United States between 1933 and 1944, driven out by Nazism and anti-Jewish laws. This flow of concert players, orchestra conductors, composers and musicologists, most often of Germanic culture, led to an incomparable blossoming of American musical life, and helped establish musicology as a university discipline. ...
...
Those who had already composed film scores in Germany brought their know-how, such as Frederick Hollander (1896-1976) and Franz Waxman (1906-1967). Hollander, who had become famous in 1930 with the music for Blue Angel, enjoyed great success in Hollywood, being nominated for four Oscars and composing the music for approximately a hundred films, including for George Cukor, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder. Waxman wrote approximately 150 film scores, including Philadelphia Story and Hitchcock’s Rebecca, Suspicion, and The Paradine Case. Nominated twelve times for an Oscar, he won two for Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Place in the Sun (1951).
Hanns Eisler (1898-1962) composed the music for numerous films, notably for Fritz Lang (Hangmen Also Die), but was expelled by McCarthyism in 1948. Kurt Weill (1900-1950), who had worked for Brecht, composed for Broadway (especially Lady in the Dark, over lyrics by Ira Gershwin, and One Touch of Venus). However, Ralph Benatzky (1884-1957), who wrote the famous operetta The White Horse Inn in Berlin in 1930, was unable to establish himself, as was Eric Zeisl (1905-1959)."
Arthur Schoenberg
Schoenberg was renowned for his experimental music, exploring atonality and the twelve-tone
scale. He was a major influence on other composers, such as George Gershwin. Yet finding his true place in the new land, in southern California, was a challenge. This essay describes how such musicians and creative artists made their way here.
https://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/en/stories/arnold-schoenberg-in-exile/
Frederick Hollander
Frederick Hollander, who had begun his music career composing music for the film industry in Germany, found a new home here with the film industry in Los Angeles.
" Hollander’s long and successful film career began auspiciously in 1929, when he was hired to compose the music for Joseph Von Sternberg’s landmark film “The Blue Angel” (“Der blaue Engel”). Marlene Dietrich’s sultry rendition of “Falling In Love Again” (“Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt”) propelled both the actress and the song to international success and legendary status. “Falling In Love Again” remains Hollander’s signature piece and has been interpreted by recording artists as diverse as Brian Ferry, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Dionne Warwick, Petula Clark, Greta Keller, Linda Ronstadt, Jean Sablon, Udo Lindenberg, Nana Mouskouri, Leontyne Price, Ute Lemper, Sammy Davis Jr. and the Beatles. "
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/cinemasexiles/biographies/the-composers/biography-frederick-hollander/200/
Pioneers in the science of the mind
Out of Vienna, Berlin and Frankfurt came a cadre of scholars of the mind ,( Freud, Adler, Lewin, Fromm, Frankl, for example) that shaped psychology and sociology as we know it today. With the rise of the Third Reich, they had to flee to safety. One of those founding figures was Ernst Simmel, who made his home in Los Angeles and founded the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.
On his significance:
"The Record Group RG-08, Dr. Ernst Simmel, Papers, 1908 -- 1947, comprises collections and sub-collection related to his professional and public activities in German and in America.
By and large, we may relate the German period as the one that is represented by Dr. Simmel's professional narratives published in international psychoanalytic periodicals, his organizational work as a Director of Sanitarium Schloss Tegel in Berlin, his professional teaching and research work in the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin, as well as his international scientific participation in conferences and like.
Dr. Simmel's American period, 1935 --1938, connotes profound difference from that one of Germany. He becomes the organizer leader and protector of the rising psychoanalytic movement in the West Coast of America.
He has taken upon himself a burden of multi-functional tasks, not always plausible in terms of accomplishing. However, Dr. Simmel being the Captain the Pilot or in official language President of the Psychoanalytic Study Group of Los Angeles in 1935 -- 1944, has laid the foundation of Psychoanalysis as the new Science in the Los Angeles. The later evolved psychoanalytic institutions inherited and ramified the fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Science organized and steered up by Dr. Ernst Simmel.
The German period represented in the Record Group largely by publications, then the American period overall comprises correspondences between Dr. Simmel and other scholars or officials as well as his narrative in the theme of Psychoanalysis in English language.
A separate theme of these collections is Dr. Simmel multi-vectorial activity as President of the Psychoanalytic Study Group of Los Angeles. In this regard, the collections well represent numerous records of scientific, business, council and other periodic gathering of the members of the Psychoanalytic Study Group of Los Angeles.
Dr. Simmel left a large corpus of personal and official correspondences, overall in English language with a number of correspondences in German language.
All in all, this Record Group of Dr. Ernst Simmel is of the immense historical value would it be scholarship, teaching, training or merely the History of Psychoanalysis as the Science." ( taken from Dr Vladmir Melamed's introduction to the archives :https://ncpla.libraryhost.com/?p=collections/findingaid&id=4&q=&rootcontentid=199
Also https://www.n-c-p.org/_Library/Archive_Documents/The_NCP_Online_Archive_Introductory_Essay_003.pdf
This woman acted and mastered stem technology at the same ti
Meet the Hollywood Star who made wi-fi possible: Heddy Lamarr
As with the invention of the computer, the technology that made Wi-Fi possible came about during another devastating global event: World War II. The head inventor wasn’t a scientist or engineer, but a famous Hollywood actress with an obsession with tinkering.
This is her story:
Heddy Lamarr on the cover page of Screenland just as she was inventing new radio technology for torp
The blurred lines of Jewish and universal identity
Franz Werfel, Viennese, Jewish or Universal?
The man who shed light on the Genocide of the Armenians, was a Jewish writer from Vienna. On his way to find refuge in southern California, he was inspired to create an award winning novel, that became an award winning movie, The Song of Bernadette, to honor a Catholic saint. His last play, reflecting upon the persecution of Jews by the Germans, Jakobowsky and the Colonel, became a movie with Danny Kaye, Me and the Colonel. Like so many Jewish intellectuals of the period, and as far back as Joseph of the Bible, he carried many personas.
The Very Jewish and german Author
Lion Feuchtwanger
While some German Jewish intellectuals were of conflicted identity ( such as Karl Marx or Heinrich Heine) Lion Feuchtwanger was both a highly acclaimed German writer and an openly Jewish writer in his choice of themes, most notably in the novel Jud Suess, The Jew Suess, about a famous Jewish advisor to German royalty who falls from grace, is sentenced to death, and declares the Sh'ma as he is about to be executed.
" LION FEUCHTWANGER was a famous German novelist who lived from 1884 to 1958. Known worldwide for his historical studies of Benjamin Franklin, the Spanish painter Goya, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and such subjects as the Salem witch hunt, the French Revolution and Rome during the first century. Many of his works attempted to come to terms with the Jewish experience in different eras and settings. Feuchtwanger escaped from Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II, living first in Southern France and ultimately fleeing Europe in 1940 to spend his final years in Los Angeles. "
https://libguides.usc.edu/c.php?g=234957&p=1559413
The Villa Aurora was the new home for the great German intellectuals who made " Weimar on the Pacific". https://www.vatmh.org/en/marta-and-lion-feuchtwanger.html
Image of Villa Aurora Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
