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Caught by Politics: Hitler Exiles and American Visual Culture, edited by Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Koepnick. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 269 pp. $69.95.
The essays contained in this volume share an unusual unity of interpretation for a collection of papers culled from an academic conference held at Washington University in 2001. They confront the general view that exiles from Hitler in the 1930s went from a cradle of community and creativity in Germany and Austria to a cauldron of consumerism and coldness in the United States. Theodor Adorno exemplified this perception in his anguished work, Minima Moralia (1951). In contrast, most of the contributors to this volume paint a more complex picture of the exilic experience, and to varying degrees they succeed.
In the introduction, editors Sabine Eckmann and Lutz Kopenick acknowledge the frustration and alienation that comes with exile. But in following theorists of the exile experience, they find that it also opens up new possibilities of creativity as artists engage in new “productive negotiations,” “ironic cultural masquerades,” “symbolic mingling,” “performance hybridization,” “performative self-transformation,” and “cultural mingling.” Although riddled with jargon and repetition, the introduction does hammer home the essential point: exile is a complex process. Many of the essays in this volume attempt to shed light on this process by looking at the specific cultural work and experiences of various exiles.
Readers of this journal, however, will search in vain for any sustained examination of issues of Jewish identity. Indeed, most of the figures analyzed in the volume are not Jewish. Edgar G. Ulmer and Peter Lorre are discussed in separate essays, but issues of their Jewish identity are, at best, peripheral to the main line of analysis. Moreover, with one exception, none of the essays distinguishes between voluntary emigration and forced exile. Nor do the essays consider whether Jewish exiles, for a host of reasons, might have brought different cultural baggage with them to the United States than those who left for political reasons.
In keeping with the shared interpretive framework of this volume, the essays demonstrate how various exiles were sometimes anguished and alienated, but also how they managed to navigate their new situations—sometimes to the point of thriving. One of the stronger essays by Iain Boyd White examines two architects, Jakob Detlef Peters (later to be known as “Jock” Peters), who voluntarily emigrated to the United States in 1922, and Karl Schneider, who fled to the United States in 1938 under political pressure. Both had already encountered, and to a degree embraced, certain stylistic and philosophical assumptions from Frank Lloyd Wright. In the United States, Peters worked on film design, but also took charge of the interior of Bullock’s department store in Los Angeles, a commission that gave him an opportunity to realize his own vision, within a commercial milieu. Schneider, with the help of other exiles in the United States, was soon working after arrival for Sears Roebuck, applying some of his design ideas—with a certain Bauhaus impetus. Artistic modernism and commercial culture did not cripple these two architects.
Some of the exiles, such as Max Beckmann and George Grosz came with bags full of illusions about America, especially on the American West. Although he spent but a summer season teaching at Mills College in Oakland, Françoise Forster-Hahn sees Beckmann’s time in California as critical, constituting a type of renewal in his work. Grosz ended up with a major commission from a young, Jewish department store owner in Dallas. While Grosz was disappointed that modern, industrial Dallas was not the wild western habitat of his dreams, his work on the interior of the department store was inspired: presenting semi-abstract images of the city, while also not neglecting the tensions that defined racial relations there. For these two artists, their American experience was fruitful and enjoyable.
In contrast, some of the exiles examined in this volume—actor Peter Lorre and painter/artist Hans Richter—were hobbled by exile. Both of them had a difficult time finding artistic freedom, often being reduced to mere caricatures, or exemplars of oddity. Lorre’s roles in films, as Lutz Kopenick points out, focused more on him as a figure of otherness, on his face as a kind of expressionless canvas.
Perhaps the most wide-ranging and effective essay in the volume is Angela Miller’s on the reception of European surrealism in the United States. She manages in her essay to deal with how surrealism was first exemplified in the American popular mind with the work and person of Salvatore Dali. But the sweep of surrealism in the United States proved to be immense, and often caught up in the politics of the era. For surrealism, with its emphasis on the unconscious and its embrace of myth, according to many on the left, challenged Marxist materialist analysis. Out of such debates, some surrealists attempted to show how it could serve as a critique of capitalism. And, as is well known, by the 1940s, surrealistic themes began to influence a host of American artists engaged in non-figurative styles of painting.
This volume joins others in a hearty debate about the nature of the exilic experience in the United States. Recently, Joseph Horowitz has argued that refugees transformed American culture. But at a price—as their own work suffered in the transatlantic crossing. Most stunningly, David Jenemann, in a book on the presumably ur-alienated intellectual Adorno, makes a compelling case that Adorno’s years in America were not a seamless hell, but included a rather productive, and sometimes positive, interaction on his part with American popular culture and mass communication! Thus, it appears that the more study that is directed at exiles from Hitler, the less assured are the conclusions to be drawn.
George Cotkin
Department of History
California Polytechnic State University
San Luis Obispo
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