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thriving local labor movement, largely led from the left. But if the stench of oil occasionally penetrated his garden in Santa Monica, Brecht fabricated the myth of the convergence of heaven and hell without really knowing what the hellish parts of Los Angeles looked like.84 Not all the Germans, of course, spent their time in Los Angeles in existential despair. Thomas Mann (according to Brecht) pictured himself in the Pacific Palisades as a latter-day Goethe in search of the land where the lemons grow.85 Schoenberg may have resented Shirley Temple, but he loved playing tennis with his other Brentwood neighbor, George Gershwin, as well as the sunlight that flooded his study each morning while he composed.86 Max Reinhart, for his part, boasted that Southern California would become a new center of culture. . . . there is no more hospitable landscape.87 Indeed for a while the more famous of the exiles could fancy themselves Hollywood sahibs: happy white people under the palm trees, feeding themselves on an economy run by invisible servants. But even the most suntanned of the exiles, including Mann and Reinhardt, woke up to the fact that behind the Mediterraneanized affluence lurked exploitation and militarism. In the first place, virtually all the Europeans railed against Hollywoods proletarianization of the intelligentsia. Here the complaints of the Weimar and Bloomsbury groups echoed the already alienated writers colony (the Screen Writers Guild had been formed in 1933), and retraced a theme, as I have argued, that was central to Los Angeles fiction. Thrown into a totally alien, opaque environment, where creative ideas, artistry and originality did not count, where everything was tuned to the ways one finds in workshops and offices,88 the exiles experienced artistic degradation amid affluence. Despite his initial euphoria about the cultural prospects of Southern California, Max Reinhardt found himself expected to punch a studio timeclock like any factory w o r k e r in 1942 he left dejectedly for New York City. Brilliant, anti-fascist actors of the Weimar theater like Fritz Kortner, Alexander Grenach, and Peter Lorre were restricted by studio bosses to ridiculous impersonations of the Nazi leadership.89 Stravinskys big break was rearranging the Rite of Spring as a soundtrack for dancing brooms in Disneys Fantasia, while Schoenberg, otherwise invisible, tutored studio composers who made musical suspense for noir thrillers and monster movies.90 Marxists, who earlier in Germany had praised the advent of

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