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

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In the Marzabotto massacre alone, 1,830 people were killed, almost exclusively civilians including the elderly, women and children. Gianluca Lucarini, whose grandparents died in the massacre, is president of the victims' association in Marzabotto. The Nazi Marzabotto Massacre: life sentence for 10 defendants Image: picture-alliance/ dpa Journalist Rifkind begins her impressive biography of screenwriter Salka Viertel (1889-1978) with a question: How can so "large and estimable" a woman "been more or less forgotten in America"? The author hopes Salka (as she is referred to throughout) will provide a role model for a new generation of readers, especially women, currently experiencing the same kinds of geopolitical issues of human migration and anti-Semitism that Salka also suffered. Her early years in Austro-Hungary were privileged. She acted on stages throughout Europe, and her circle of friends included Franz Kafka and Max Brod. In 1928, with National Socialism on the rise, Salka and her filmmaker husband, Berthold, along with thousands of other refugees, fled to greater Los Angeles. They both worked with F.W. Murnau on film projects and befriended other immigrants like Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, and Ernst Lubitsch. Rifkind chronicles in meticulous detail Salka's substantial career in a hostile Hollywood studio system that regularly ignored the contributions of women. She wrote screenplays for a number of films, most notably Queen Christina (1933), working closely with producer Irving Thalberg and the film's star, Greta Garbo, who took Salka under her wing. Their relationship would become the "longest and most important…either of them would ever have in Hollywood." Rifkind calls Salka a "connector of people." Her legendary Sunday afternoon gatherings at her Santa Monica home on Mabery Street became an intellectual "place of shelter" for immigrants, including Sergei Eisenstein, Aldous Huxley, and Thomas Mann and Christopher Isherwood, two of Salka's best friends. She helped refugees find jobs and places to stay, and she provided financial support. Her activities with political organizations supporting refugees drew the attention of the FBI, which tapped her phones and read her mail. In 1953, Salka moved to Switzerland, where she wrote her memoir, The Kindness of Strangers.

Several castles of the aristocracy like the Rosenburg, Rastenberg, Rapottenstein, Heidenreichstein und rich monasteries like Zwettl, Altenburg and Geras stamp the character of the harsh, highly romantic landscape. Viertel, Salka (1969). The Kindness of Strangers (1sted.). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ISBN 9780030764707. OCLC 1088134575 . Retrieved 7 July 2022. He characterized the Germany POW recruitment project, which he was a part of, with the following discussion. “What eloquence was used to buy treason, only they could tell. Perhaps it was nothing but a cigarette and the pride of sitting beside an officer in a soft armchair at the stove? Perhaps the lure of danger or the promise of wealth? Perhaps the hope of a better world?” Dissolution of Alpine associations not under command of the Italian Alpine Club, transfer of all Alpine refuges to the Italian Alpine Club. Salka Viertel (1889-1978) was an actress, screenwriter, influential hostess and effective humanitarian. She was born on the estate of her wealthy Jewish family in Sambor, western Ukraine, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Her father, a prominent lawyer, was mayor of the town, one brother was a concert pianist, another was a professional soccer player. She was neither a beauty nor a star, but acted in everything from Greek drama to Schiller and Strindberg in the major cities of central Europe. Her stage career ended when she and her husband Berthold Viertel moved to America in 1928.After her divorce in 1947, Salka lived in Brentwood, Southern California. In 1953, she left the U.S. and settled in Klosters in Switzerland, where later, her son Peter and his second wife, actress Deborah Kerr, [2] lived. The historians researched the bloody history of World War II's final years in Rome and Berlin for the past three-and-a-half years. Guided by the questions of where, when and who, Schieder said they based their research on the experiences of those affected, including victims and perpetrators. The cover stories had to include good reasons for traveling. The most acceptable justification for a soldier traveling alone was that of returning to his unit after being hospitalized for medical treatment. But this story had to be absolutely supported by a clinical diagnosis contained in the Soldbuch. Many of the refugees who fled to Britain from Hitler’s Mitteleuropa went on to make an important contribution to the cultural and intellectual life of their new homeland: artists and architects, musicians, photographers, film-makers, choreographers, writers, publishers, historians, scientists and many another. Nevertheless, Salka’s three sons managed to have successful lives. Hans became a linguistics scholar at MIT. Thomas worked at the Los Angeles Department for Social Services. Peter (who was my friend and introduced me to the bullfighters who knew Hemingway) graduated from Dartmouth in 1941. He served as a marine in the Allied landings in the Solomon Islands, won a Silver Star, and, as a spymaster with the OSS, parachuted anti-Nazis into wartime Germany. The beautiful Jigee Schulberg left her husband for Peter, who married her in 1943. Both had affairs, and Peter’s lovers included Joan Fontaine and Ava Gardner. Jigee became an alcoholic and drug addict and, in a ghastly accident, burned herself to death. Peter — who’d brought out a novel, The Canyon, when he was nineteen — wrote the screenplays of The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and the Sea, became a great friend of John Huston and Hemingway, and published a brilliant memoir, Dangerous Friends (1992), about them. He finally had a long and happy marriage to the elegant Scottish actress, Deborah Kerr.

Ferrandi, Maurizio (2020). Il nazionalista: Ettore Tolomei, l'uomo che inventò l'Alto Adige. Prefazione di Hannes Obermair. Merano: alphabeta. pp.173–6. ISBN 978-88-7223-363-4. The Hitler family, from which also the motherly grandmother derived, belonged for generations into the dominion of Landgraf Fürstenberg, who resided on the middle-age castle of Weitra and managed the vast sourrounding forests. Many were Jewish, though their Jewishness was often of secondary significance (Ernst Gombrich, later director of the Warburg Institute, said that whether a historian or philosopher happened to be Jewish was more the domain of Hitler or Goebbels). Nevertheless, even the most resourceful of the émigrés faced psychological turmoil. Whatever their opinion of L.A., they could not escape the universal condition of the refugee, in which images of the lost homeland intrude on any attempt to begin anew. They felt an excruciating dissonance between their idyllic circumstances and the horrors that were unfolding in Europe. Furthermore, they saw the all too familiar forces of intolerance and indifference lurking beneath America’s shining façades. To revisit exile literature against the trajectory of early-twentieth-century politics makes one wonder: What would it be like to flee one’s native country in terror or disgust, and start over in an unknown land?Peter Viertel died at age 86 in November 2007. He not only left his mark on the OSS, but in Hollywood as a writer, collaborating with such greats as Ernest Hemingway and John Huston to turn novels into screenplays and successful movies. Georg Grote, Hannes Obermair (2017). A Land on the Threshold. South Tyrolean Transformations, 1915–2015. Oxford, Bern, New York: Peter Lang. pp.417+. ISBN 978-3-0343-2240-9. Echte Häuser, falsche Beschriftung: Das „Hitler Viertel“, Quelle: Google Maps Empörung bereits 2015 Rifkind, Donna (2020). The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood. New York: Other Press. ISBN 9781590517215. OCLC 1255775938. Da es sich nur um ein Wohnviertel ohne speziellen Namen handelt, kam wohl jemand auf die Idee, bei Google Maps einen Namen einzutragen – denn dies kann jeder beantragen, und jeder kann auch Änderungen vorschlagen. Doch keine einzige Suchmaschine findet Schilder, Adressen oder Beschreibungen, dass der Häuserkomplex wirklich „Hitler Viertel“ heißt.