Refuge and Reality: Feuchtwanger and the European Émigrés in California. Ed. Pól O’Dochartaigh and Alexander Stephan (German Monitor, 61).

• Axel Stähler

It is said of Thomas Mann that, asked how he would make do without German culture in his Californian exile, he pronounced: “I am German culture”. While the first person singular in his retort may speak of an inflated ego, it is, of course, true that much of what constituted German culture was centred, in the early 1940s, in the Californian exile. Among the most conspicuous members of the émigré community, next to Mann, and for very much longer, were Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, whose new home in Pacific Palisades, the Villa Aurora, became a haven for European exiles.

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