Liesl Frank, Charlotte Dieterle and the European Film Fund

Liesl Frank, Charlotte Dieterle and the European Film Fund

By Martin Sauter

Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Warwick University/ German Department

Supervised by Professor Erica Carter

February 2010

Liesl Frank, Charlotte Dieterle and the European Film Fund

By Martin Sauter

Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Warwick University/ German Department Supervised by Professor Erica Carter February 2010

I am profoundly indebted to the many people, archives and institutions who have helped this thesis reach completion: to Warwick University for awarding me a bursary that allowed me to embark on my examination by fully concentrating on my research; to my doctoral supervisor, Professor Dr. Erica Carter who shepherded me through this thesis and who taught me what it requires to be a scholar and historian; to Professor Emeritus Dr. John Spalek, Albany, for letting me have the use of his house while I conducted research at the State University of New York at Albany, and especially for generously making his personal exile archive accessible to me; to Gero Gandert from the Kinemathek, Berlin, who encouraged me to write about the European Film Fund and who shared his knowledge about German-Jewish émigrés with me, and, also, for putting me in touch with a number of descendants of erstwhile émigrés in Hollywood; to Robert Koster, Lupita Tovar-Kohner, Pancho Kohner, Renata Lenart, and John Pommer in Los Angeles for generously giving of their time and providing me with first-hand accounts of the exile experience; to Dr. Jan-Christopher Horak, Los Angeles, who also encouraged me in my decision to make the European Film Fund the topic of my doctoral thesis; to Holly-Jane Rahlens, Berlin, for putting me in touch with Gero Gandert and Renata Lenart; to Dr. Carey Harrison, New York, for sharing his memories of his mother, Lilli Palmer, with me; to Dr. Dr. Helwig Hassenpflug, Berlin, for tirelessly answering all my questions regarding the life in exile of the late Blandine Ebinger, his former wife; to Dr. Virginia Sease, Dornach/ Switzerland, and Dr. Erich Frey, Los Angeles, for talking to me about their encounters with Liesl Frank; to Dr. Thomas Elsaesser, Amsterdam, for providing me with a copy of his interview with the late Walter Reisch.

Thanks must also go to the many librarians and archivists who have helped and assisted me in my research: to Barbara Hall at the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills; to Caroline Sisneros at the Louis B. Mayer Library at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles; to Marje Schütze-Coburn and Rachelle Balinas Smith at the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles; to Gerrit Thiess at the Kinemathek Berlin; to John Vernon and Robert Ellis at the National Archives at College Park/ Maryland; to Mary Y. Osielski at the Grenander Department of Special Collections at the State University of New York at Albany; to Katrin Kokot and Sylvia Asmus at the Exile Archive of the German National Library at Frankfurt/ Main; to

Miriam Intrator and Irit G. Pinchovski at the Center for Jewish History in New York; to Carmen Kaspar, Elke Tietz-Allmendinger, Hildegard Dieke and Jan Buerger at the German Literature Archive at Marbach; to Ina Prescher, Synke Vollring, Elgine Helmstädt, Nicky Rittmeyer and Andrea Rolz at the Academy of Arts in Berlin; and to Dr. Stefan Mörz at the Archives of the City of Ludwigshafen. I am also deeply indebted to Barbara Bab-Houlehan, Kentucky, and Marianne Brünn-Kortner, Berlin, for allowing me to photocopy documents pertaining to their fathers, Julius Bab and Fritz Kortner respectively. Furthermore, I would like to thank Dr. Ian Wallace, Bath, Brian Neve, Bath, Dr. Armin Loacker, Vienna, Dr. Helmut G. Asper, Bielefeld, and Werner Sudendorf, Berlin, for their help and advice.

Last but not least, I should like to thank my former employer, Chanel S. A. in Paris, as well as my friends Martin Wörle, Frank Schott, Tülay and Ceyhan Özbek, Bruno Secchi, Benoit Dufrene, Stefan Fuhrmann and Michael Chambers for their understanding, support, and generosity over the past three years.

Abstract

Setting out to provide a definitive history of the European Film Fund (EFF), the purpose of this thesis is as follows: first, to draw attention to the many exile and refugee organisations by examining one of them, the EFF. As a study of a refugee organisation founded as a result of Nazism, my examination of the EFF not only fills an existing gap in film history as far as the EFF itself is concerned. Refugee organisations in general have received scant attention by exile scholars. By making one refugee organisation the focus of my inquiry, I am also highlighting the presence of women in the topic of exile as two women, Liesl Frank, wife of the writer Bruno Frank, and Charlotte Dieterle, wife of the director William Dieterle, were at the centre of the EFF. My investigation of this organisation demonstrates that women played a much larger role in exile and exile communities than history and literature have thus far accorded them. Additionally, I show how the political situation after 1933, including apathy by the international community, led to the founding of the EFF. Lastly, by shifting the focus away from figureheads of the émigré community to below-the-line film artists, technicians, theatre artists and so on, I foreground those refugees whose lives have hitherto been obscured by their more famous fellow émigrés.

List of Abbreviations

ASC - American Society of Cinematographers

EFF - European Film Fund

ERC - Emergency Rescue Committee

ERF - European Relief Fund

HANL - Hollywood Anti-Nazi League

HICEM - Acronym of the names of three organisations: HIAS (=Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), ICA (Jewish Colonization Agency), and Emigdirect.

HUAC - House Un-American Activities Committee

IATSE - International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Moving Picture Machine Operators of the United States and Canada

IRA - International Relief Association

MPRF - Motion Picture Relief Fund

Chapter One

Introduction

Until 1989, when the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, now the Deutsche Kinemathek, acquired the Paul Kohner Archive, the story of the European Film Fund was shrouded in mystery. Though references to the EFF in the then nascent field of exile research were numerous, researchers were confronted with a lack of empirical data and thus had to rely on secondary sources to research what this thesis will argue was a highly significant organisation in the history of film exile. These sources - biographies and autobiographies - tended to be vague or anecdotal in their allusions to the EFF. Referring to the sketchy picture that existed of the EFF, E. Bond Johnson, one of the first scholars to conduct research on the EFF in 1976, quoted Paul Kohner’s brother, Frederick, as commenting that, ‘the only way to write about the Fund is in a sort of Rashomon1 - that’s how multifarious the accounts and opinions were when he began his research on this part of his brother’s activity’ (Bond Johnson in Spalek & Strelka 1976: 136). In 1975, Marta Feuchtwanger, in her oral history with Lawrence Weschler,2 had already said that ‘... there was this foundation which is called European Film Fund, which was founded by Lisl [sic] Frank [...] and Charlotte Dieterle [...].What I should stress also was that the whole film people did so much for it [......]. Nobody ever speaks about it; I’m always upset that they have no more recognition’.3 The relative wealth of archival data now available on the EFF, has spawned surprisingly few investigations of this particular organisation, or indeed of similar organisations that sprang up as a result of the exile experience. To date, the most coherent account of the EFF can be found in H.G. Asper’s seminal Etwas besseres als den Tod ..., but since Asper’s intention was not to furnish a scholarly study of the organisation, his chapter on the EFF is factual and anecdotal rather than analytical. However, Asper’s pioneering account served as an inspiration for me to embark on my own investigation of this organisation.

My thesis sets out, by contrast, to breathe new life into our perception of the EFF by providing its definitive history. To this end, I have drawn extensively on archival sources. Those sources will be discussed at greater length at the end of this chapter. However, the EFF must also be seen as one case study within a lager historiography of exile in Hollywood. This thesis begins therefore with a review of that historiography, which can be broadly classified under three headings: early histories of exile in Hollywood and the United States, autobiographies and biographies, and studies on film exile. I refer in the body of this thesis to the wide range of literature on American film history I have consulted, as well as works on the contemporary politics of the 1930s and 40s that provide a conceptual and contextual framework for my investigation, enabling me to put the EFF - its founding and its operations - into a political and sociological perspective.4

Early Histories of Exile in Hollywood and the United States

Although primary and secondary literature relating directly to the EFF - or any other refugee organisation that emerged as a result of Hitler’s rise to power - is sparse, the related field of literature on exile is vast. The use of the term ‘literature on exile’ is a deliberate choice on my part in order not to confuse what has been written on exile with literature that was written in exile, which John Spalek refers to as exile literature (see: Spalek 1982: xi). Though references to the EFF in the literature on exile are often cursory and sometimes even inaccurate, the findings of exile scholars and researchers prove an important source of information concerning the Los Angeles émigré community in general. As literature on exile has spawned a whole subgenre of popular publications, for reasons of precision dividing the field into scholarly and journalistic approaches would seem appropriate.5

The first book on the broader topic of anti-Nazi emigration goes back to 1939 when Klaus and Erika Mann first published their collaboratively written Escape to Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939). To this day their book has remained a significant and invaluable reference work on exile. The Manns wrote their book from an anti-Nazi stance, as a clear statement against Nazi Germany and its annihilation of German culture, with the intention of drawing attention to the ‘other Germany’, in other words, those Germans who were not contaminated by Nazism. Owing to the extraordinary access both Manns had to various émigré circles that formed around the world - in Zürich, Paris, London, Los Angeles - their book has never lost validity. Klaus and Erika Mann not only lived in a remarkable number of places that became émigré hubs, but knew many exiled writers, directors, and actors intimately. Theirs is a tersely written, sharply observed book, that covers literary as well as filmic emigration. Escape to Life provides an early, yet comprehensive overview of exile while the book’s structure -starting with the political situation in Nazi Germany following Hitler’s takeover and then moving on to discuss various émigré hubs - makes it evident that it served as a blueprint for Jean-Michel Palmier’s arguably more ambitious Weimar en exile (Paris: Payot, 1988), published nearly fifty years later.

One of the first significant publications focussing exclusively on exiled German-Jewish writers appeared in 1947, when the former exile Alfred Kantorowicz, in collaboration with Richard Drews, published Verboten und verbrannt (Berlin: Ullstein, 1947), a first attempt at coming to terms with the extent and ramifications of literary exile. Also included in Verboten und verbrannt are ‘inner émigrés’ such as Erich Kästner and writers like Franz Kafka who, of course, had long been dead when the Nazis came to power, but whose inclusion is due to the central role played by the exiled writer Max Brod in Kafka’s life and the publication of his work. The body of Verboten und verbrannt consists of brief biographical sketches of nearly two hundred writers, followed by an excerpt of one of their works. Though Verboten und verbrannt is little more than a compendium of the literary exile, Kantorowicz and Drews explain in the introduction to their book that their aim was to

inspire curiosity; to provide a first, rough, non-sectionalised and not yet complete overview; a reference book, which gives an idea about the scope of those who were banned and burnt;6 nothing more and nothing less (Kantorowicz & Drews 1947: 10).

As a compendium of literary exile, published so shortly after the Holocaust, Verboten und verbrannt was certainly timely and fulfilled its documentary purpose. But a more comprehensive debate on exiled writers and their literary output only started almost twenty years later when in 1965 the exhibition Deutsche Exil-Literatur 1933-45 was opened at the German National Library in Frankfurt/ Main and subsequently travelled to 20 cities in and outside West Germany. This constituted the first significant attempt by West Germany to come to terms with its vanished literary heritage. In John Spalek’s assessment, the exhibition was of ‘seminal importance [...], stimulating] numerous other exhibits that served to call the public’s attention to the fact of the anti-Nazi emigration of the thirties’ (Spalek 1982: xvii). Spalek has also noted that already in the 1950s, several studies had appeared that examined the political emigration (see: Spalek 1982: xvi). Nonetheless, the effect of the Frankfurt exhibition was profound, for it certainly cannot be a coincidence that ‘the bulk of publications, especially on German literature in exile, occurred in the decade starting roughly in 1966 and continuing until about 1976’ (Spalek 1982: xvi).

The end of this decade saw two different publications on the topic of film exile, one of which marks the beginning of serious scholarly examination of exiled German-Jewish film artists. John Baxter’s The Hollywood Exiles (London: Macdonald & Jane’s, 1976) is a largely anecdotal account of European film artists from various European countries who came to live and work in Hollywood, starting in the 1920s. Although his book concludes with the forced emigration due to the rise of Nazism, Baxter’s book prefigured what would later become an important concern of film historians and exile researchers, inasmuch as he looks at the impact European film artists, writers, etc., had on Hollywood, starting with Lubitsch’s departure for Hollywood in 1923. Due to its journalistic style, Baxter’s book falls into the category of popular publications on exile, and thus is of limited consequence to the scholar today. However, seen in the context of its time, his was significant as one of the earliest works to consider the influence of Europeans on popular American culture. Moreover, Baxter’s book was also one of the earliest publications to - albeit briefly - mention the European Film Fund.

Considering the absence of scholarly interest since that date, it is interesting that 1976 was also the year in which the European Film Fund was first discussed in an academic context. In John Spalek and Joseph Strelka‘s, Deutsche Exilliteratur seit 1933, Band 1: Kalifornien (Bern: Franke, 1976), E. Bond Johnson attempts to recapitulate the history of the EFF and evaluate its role in the émigré community. However, although Bond Johnson had access to a number of primary sources - including personal testimonies from one of the key figures discussed in this thesis - a lack of empirical data, and the fact that exile research as a field of study to which he could refer was not yet in existence, make his account patchy and sometimes even downright inaccurate. He falls prey, for instance, to the often repeated error of confusing the European Film Fund with the European Relief Fund, which, in fact, was founded much later, after the EFF had already been dissolved. As mentioned earlier, Bond Johnson was well aware of the difficulty of writing about a subject with only limited sources to draw on. Thus he concludes his essay by saying,

the archival material on the EFF is still relatively scarce. Hopefully,

one day the activities of the Fund will be become clearer and its members deserve to be better known. [...] The more we know about the EFF, the better we will be able to understand the exile community, in which the EFF played a crucial role (Bond Johnson in Spalek & Strelka 1976: 144).

The fact that Bond Johnson himself pointed to the complexity and limitations of writing about a topic on which no reliable secondary sources exist, let alone archival material, represented a challenge for my own examination. Mindful of the blurry picture that has prevailed heretofore of the EFF, I was determined to use the archival material that has since become available to unravel the story of the organisation without losing sight of its inadequacies.

Autobiographies and Biographies

The publication of these early books and studies on exile was paralleled by a number of biographies and autobiographies of former émigrés that first began to appear over the course of the 1950s. They may have drawn attention to ‘the ca. 1, 500 film professionals to leave Germany after 1933 and Austria after 1938’(Horak 1986: 241) at a time when exile scholars were still largely preoccupied with the literary emigration. Most noteworthy are Leonhard Frank’s Links wo das Herz ist (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1952), Fritz Kortner’s Aller Tage Abend (Munich: Kindler, 1959), Friedrich Hollander’s Von Kopf bis Fuss (Munich: Kindler, 1959), Salka Viertel’s The Kindness of Strangers (New York/ NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969), Lilli Palmer’s Dicke Lilli - gutes Kind (Zurich: Dromer Knaur Verlag, Scholler & Co., 1974), and Frederick Kohner’s The Magician of Sunset Boulevard - The Improbable Life of Paul Kohner, Hollywood Agent (Palos Verdes/ CA: Morgan Press, 1977). These (auto)biographies came at a time when the topic of exile was not widely discussed in the public domain. Hence, besides serving as a source for exile researchers to glean necessary information on émigrés and the Hollywood émigré community, these books raised awareness among the general public concerning the issue of exile. After all, prior to Lilli Palmer’s publication of her autobiography, who in Germany knew that she was forced to leave the country of her birth because she was Jewish?

In terms of its relevance for researchers, Viertel’s book was probably the most influential.

As one of the premier hostesses of Hollywood’s émigré community, this MGM screenwriter, Garbo confidante, and wife of director Berthold Viertel, had formidable access to various overlapping émigré circles. An actress turned screenwriter by profession, Viertel was politically left wing and an active member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Regular guests at her gatherings consisted of a motley mix of intellectuals, writers, directors and actors. Bertolt Brecht, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Garbo, Gottfried Reinhardt were all regular attendees (see: Isherwood 1997: 49, 62, 92). Her memoirs, which focus on the years between 1933 - 45, are candid and peppered with anecdotes and personal observations which made them a treasure trove for exile researchers at a time when primary and secondary sources, particularly those on film artists, were still relatively scarce. This is evidenced, for instance, in the publications of film critic John Russell Taylor (Strangers in Paradise, New York/ NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1983), or Anthony Heilbut, himself the son of German-Jewish refugees (Exiled in Paradise, New York/ NY: Viking Press, 1983), both of whom draw on The Kindness of Strangers. Of these however, Heilbut, Taylor, Viertel, and Kohner, make only more or less cursory mention of the EFF, conveying an inaccurate picture of the organisation which, if anything, contributed to promulgating the legend that surrounds it. However, even now, thirty years after its publication, Viertel’s book is often referred to, for instance, by Carola Stern in her biography of Liesl Frank’s mother, Fritzi Massary (Die Sache die man Liebe nennt, Berlin: Rowolth, 1998) and Diana McLellan in her examination of ‘Sapphic Hollywood’ (The Girls - Sappho Goes to Hollywood, New York/ NY: LA Weekly Books, 2000). As Viertel is central to McLellan’s book, McLellan relies heavily on The Kindness of Strangers, though she reveals details about Viertel’s life that Viertel herself either glossed over or chose to omit altogether, such as, for instance, her amorous relationship with Gottfried Reinhardt or her acquaintance with both Mercedes de Acosta and Marlene Dietrich. This underscores the limitations of autobiographical sources as they are often self-serving. Their point of view is wholly subjective and they are based on the author’s memory which, by nature, is unreliable. Thus, if autobiographies are used at all, they must ideally be backed up by empirical sources.

Studies on Film Exile

It was also in the mid-1970s that Jan-Christopher Horak, having received a grant from the American Film Institute in 1975, embarked on a series of oral histories, interviewing some formerly exiled film artists such as Douglas Sirk, Paul Andor, Johanna Kortner and Carl Esmond.7 Horak’s oral histories were subsequently published in an article, ‘The Palm Trees Were Gently Swaying’ (In: Image 23.1., 1980), which ‘can be regarded as the first written (academic) publication on film emigration’ (Horak in Horak XiX: 1984). Thus, Horak can be credited with launching the scholarly examination of German-Jewish film artists, and in time, he would emerge as the leading figure in the field of exile research. Horak’s article, starting with a quote by Max Reinhardt in which he refers to the ‘wandering Jew’ and the age-old persecution of the Jews, sets out to establish the basic parameters for the scholarly study of film exile by providing an introductory overview of issues relevant to film emigration, including cultural differences (language problems, the difficulties of adapting to a new country, etc.); the travails of the journey into exile, which in most cases did not lead directly to Hollywood but usually either via Vienna or Paris; the problems faced by such below-the-line personnel as the cinematographers Eugen Schüfftan, Curt Courant, etc. Horak’s article not only touches on a number of topics which, at the time, had barely been commented on (e.g. visa regulations, or the relative ease with which musicians established themselves in Hollywood), he also deserves credit for mentioning émigré actresses such as Gisela Werbezirk and Mady Christians, people who, even today, are rarely mentioned in exile studies, reflecting the absence of women from exile research in general. Since exile research was still in its infancy and Horak having had limited archival material and reliable secondary sources to draw on, ‘The Palm Trees ...’ constitutes a grass-roots effort. However, the limited availability of empirical data and trustworthy secondary sources almost inevitably caused ‘The Palm Trees ...’ to have its inadequacies, including factual errors.8 Also, ‘The Palm Trees .’ does not yet have the clear focus of inquiry that Horak would bring to his subsequent examinations of film exile. But, as he himself elucidates, “To measure the influence of the Middle European émigrés on Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s would be a much larger task than the one set forth here” (Horak 1980: 32). In that respect ‘The Palm Trees.’ is revealing, inasmuch as it already hints at what would become Horak’s subsequent preoccupation - the émigrés’ involvement in Hollywood anti-Nazi films - to which he already dedicates several paragraphs in this, his pioneering attempt at an overview of film exile. With this article Horak laid the foundation for the scholarly examination of film exile and, more importantly, provided a stimulus for fellow scholars to follow up on his findings.