The Sun And Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood

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Her guests included not only Sergei Eisenstein and Charlie Chaplin but also Arnold Schoenberg, Christopher Isherwood (who moved into Viertel's garage apartment with his boyfriend in 1946 [4]), Hanns Eisler, Bertolt Brecht, Max Reinhardt, and Thomas Mann. Vertiel was denied a passport when Berthold was dying, the US government’s revenge on her for helping exiles who were under “suspicion” even though there was nothing in the Viertel’s extensive FBI files that implicated them in any criminal matter.

In The Sun and Her Stars, Donna Rifkind delves into the fascinating, complex life and work of one of Hollywood’s unsung screenwriting legends and emerges with a rich and illuminating biography, one that Salka Viertel herself would have undoubtedly adored. She became a mentor and friend to Greta Garbo and contributed to scripts for the famous actress for such films as Queen Christina, Anna Karenina, and Two-Faced Woman. Salka’s letters to and from her husband Berthold Viertel are of world-class literary quality in several languages.

In the 1930s and 1940s, while fighting against National Socialism, she came to the aid of those trapped in Europe, [7] in part by helping to found the European Film Fund, [2] which brokered contracts with major Hollywood studios. In The Sun and Her Stars , Donna Rifkind delves into the fascinating, complex life and work of one of Hollywood’s unsung screenwriting legends and emerges with a rich and illuminating biography, one that Salka Viertel herself would have undoubtedly adored. On another occasion, the director Fred Zinnemann, who lived near Salka, was patrolling the neighborhood as an air-raid warden. What kept the luckiest of the 1930s refugees going, as Elie Wiesel wrote about Adam in the book of Genesis, is that God gave them a secret: not about how to begin, but how to begin again.

The Salon of Exiled Artists in California: Salka Viertel took in actors, prominent intellectuals and anonymous people in exile fleeing from Nazism, ISBN 9780463206126, ISBN 9798647624079, Los Gatos: Smashwords. After the collapse of Germany’s Weimar Republic and during the rise of Hitler’s Europe, thousands of artists and intellectuals streamed out of occupied countries, trying to beat the closing door and overcome restrictive immigration quotas to enter the United States. S. military intelligence officer and later wrote the screenplay for the 1951 award-winning film “Decision Before Dawn,” as well as “The African Queen” and other notable films. She contributed financially to a relief fund that assisted destitute German-speaking refugees in the film industry.As Donna Rifkind reminds us in “ The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood,” the National Socialists “suppressed all journalism, theater, literature, painting and film that threatened their stranglehold on the nation. In the documentation about the antifascist intellectuals who fled from Hitler’s Germany, I found a similar absence. America’s own deeply rooted anti-Semitism, the eruptions of homegrown fascism that emerged in the 1930s with rallies sponsored by the Silver Shirts and the German American Bund, and widespread anti-immigrant sentiments stoked by such fearmongers as Father Coughlin were factors in the Roosevelt administration’s reluctance to alter strict immigration policies that had been further tightened during the Great Depression.

James Rudin (he/him) is the former head of the American Jewish Committee’s Department of Interreligious Affairs and author of seven books, including The People In The Room: Rabbis, Nuns, Pastors, Popes, And Presidents.Rifkind sadly notes there were “Not nearly enough miracles” for those who desperately attempted to escape Nazism in the years before America’s entry into World War II.

It is more often in the imaginative literature about Hollywood and the 1930s exiles, rather than in the histories, that women play prominent roles and emerge as fully fleshed characters: Anna Trautwein in Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel Paris Gazette, for example; or Erich Maria Remarque’s heroines in Shadows in Paradise and The Night in Lisbon; and Salka herself, who appears in fictional form in Joseph Kanon’s Stardust, Elizabeth Frank’s Cheat and Charmer, Gavin Lambert’s Inside Daisy Clover, Christopher Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood, Irwin Shaw’s short story “Instrument of Salvation,” and, fleetingly, in the film The Way We Were. Viertel’s employment at MGM supported both her family and, by 1936, her unofficial ambassadorship to Hollywood’s mushrooming immigrant community. She has also been a contributor to the Los Angeles Times , Washington Post , Times Literary Supplement , American Scholar , and other publications. The treatment of refugees was not at that time a political issue and it is not now, though it has become politicized in both eras.Between cities, sons, and gigs, she also knocked out a screen treatment for Hungarian producer Gabriel Pascal. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The actress Shelley Winters once spotted Salka — then well into her 50s — making out in a convertible with the young Montgomery Clift following a party at Gene Kelly’s. S. and settled in Klosters in Switzerland, where later, her son Peter and his second wife, actress Deborah Kerr, [2] lived.