To prepare us for the ironies that suffuse "A Windfall of Musicians: Hitler's Émigrés and Exiles in Southern California," Dorothy Lamb Crawford first calls our attention to the curious intellectual pretensions of the Nazi elite that came to govern Germany in 1933.
Adolf Hitler and his inner circle may have been a gang of thugs and murderers, but they imagined themselves to be nothing less than the saviors and guardians of high civilization.
Hitler, of course, was a failed artist and a devoted fan of Wagner. Josef Goebbels was the frustrated author of an unpublished novel. Once in power, they turned their ungentle attention to the intelligentsia of Germany.
"It's all over with Germany," declared Austrian cellist Emanuel Feuermann, the youngest professor at the Berlin Conservatory, "all over with Europe."
To spare themselves from a culture war that soon turned into a shooting war, artists, writers and composers -- both Jews and non-Jews -- began to flee the continent in search of a safe haven. Because the movie industry had started making "talkies" a few years earlier, Southern California turned out to be such a place.
Studio work was available for men (and a few women) previously showcased in the theaters and concert halls of Europe. What had been regarded as a cultural desert suddenly flowered with transplanted musicians.
But that's only the first note of irony Crawford sounds. "A different irony," she explains, "lies in the fact that the Hollywood film studios themselves were quasi dictatorships."
Frederick Hollander may have composed "Falling in Love Again" for Josef von Sternberg's "The Blue Angel" -- the German movie that made Marlene Dietrich a star -- but the head of Paramount's music department dismissed his early studio efforts. At one point, Hollander managed to eat only because his wife was willing to shoplift food from local grocery stores.
"For most European composers," writes Crawford, "Hollywood fully justified the title of Bertolt Brecht's 1941 poem about Los Angeles, 'On Thinking About Hell.' "
Yet as Crawford reminds us, Los Angeles saved their lives as well as their livelihoods.
When Otto Klemperer was dismissed as director of the Berlin State Opera because of his Jewish ancestry, he fled to Switzerland, disdaining a job with the Los Angeles Philharmonic until he discovered a warrant had been issued in Germany for his arrest. (By yet another twist of fate, his son, Werner, ended up playing a comical Nazi officer in the TV series "Hogan's Heroes.")
