Kerstin Zilm: Marta brought furniture from surplus and secondhand stores in Los Angeles to the villa.
#IMME M KAMP GERMAN PORTRAIT PAINTER WINDOWS#
It is said that they spent the first couple of days or nights in the garden because they had to clean up, windows were broken and all that stuff. They got an advance for Feuchtwanger’s next novel. Then it was about three years of salary for a school teacher. It was exactly what Marta had been looking for. But the newcomers felt it was perfect for creating a writer’s home here, with enough space to entertain friends and colleagues. Nobody had lived in the house for several years, so it was in bad shape when the Feuchtwangers arrived. She loved the Spanish style house among eucalyptus and palm trees with towering white walls, red roof tiles, balconies and the big yard she could turn into a blooming garden. Marta found the Villa Aurora at 520 Paseo Miramar in the hills of Pacific Palisades, overlooking Santa Monica bay with breathtaking views of the Pacific Ocean. Kerstin Zilm: The Feuchtwangers soon joined an already large group of exiles in Southern California. When they were in Spain they went to Lissabon and from Lissabon they took the ship to New York. It was a very dangerous, very perilous trip. The same group was joined by Heinrich and Thomas Mann. And then they immediately went on foot over the Pyrenees mountains into Spain.
and finally, with the help of - among other people - Eleanor Roosevelt and American diplomats they managed to smuggle Feuchtwanger out of the internment camp in women’s clothes. The couple first fled to Southern France, which proved to not be safe. The Nazis took away his German citizenship and publicly burned his books.
Lion Feuchtwanger had been a critic of Adolf Hitler since the 1920s. Lion died in California in 1958, his wife almost thirty years later, in 1987. About 15 visitors follow her through the last home that the Feuchtwangers created for themselves. She leads a spontaneous tour through the maze of rooms, staircases, and hallways, across creaky wooden floors, past black and white pictures, drawings, and busts. Kerstin Zilm: Margit Kleinman, director of the Villa Aurora, tells the story about how Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger came to Los Angeles. And she, Marta, was only interned for a couple of weeks in a women’s camp. Margit Kleinman: Feuchtwanger himself was then under the Vichy government interned in the South of France for about six months, in Les Milles, an internment camp. Take a trip to the Villa Aurora and the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades.
Exile, transatlantic relationships, and debates about pressing global issues - those themes fill Feuchtwanger’s and Mann’s former homes again today. Lion Feuchtwanger and Thomas Mann were two of the more prominent “exiles in paradise.” Their new surroundings reminded them of the Mediterranean while they were constantly thinking about the country, friends, and family they had to leave behind. Kerstin Zilm: During the Nazi Regime, German artists, scientists, and other intellectuals found refuge in Southern California.
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