Non-fiction
Jan Jekal
Paranoia in Hollywood
[Paranoia in Hollywood]
Translation Grant Programme
For this title we provide support for translation into the Polish language (2025 - 2027).
Between freedom and suspicion: How American anticommunism drove German émigrés out of Hollywood
He didn’t want to rest in this “soulless soil,” to which he owed nothing and which knew nothing of him, wrote Thomas Mann after years of Californian exile shortly before leaving the United States for Switzerland, where he died just three years later in 1955. These are strong words coming from the most famous German dissident of that era, who’d been welcomed to America with open arms in 1938. He had even been granted American citizenship. What prompted this representative of the “good Germany” to suddenly turn against his host country?
Film critic Jan Jekal (b. 1993) explores this question in his richly documented study of German exiles in Hollywood, and the answer in his estimation is the rising tide of anticommunism. The so-called second Red Scare had created an atmosphere of paranoia after World War II. The witch hunt against supposed communists, led by F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover and the hysterical Senator Joseph McCarthy, resulted in many former victims of political persecution under the Nazis being targeted once again by yet another hate campaign. After first being generously offered safe haven, a place to rebuild the lives destroyed by the war and the Holocaust, many of these antifascists were now viewed with suspicion by their adoptive country. Their crime: not demonstrating sufficient ideological opposition to America’s erstwhile military ally and new political foe in the Cold War, the Soviet Union.
Thomas Mann wasn’t the only one whose criticism of America’s aggressive policy of mistrust turned him from being a hero into a persona non grata. His daughter Erika had long been viewed by the authorities as a closet communist. And so, after years of exile in the United States and in some cases brilliant careers in the dream factory of Hollywood, a host of authors, directors, screenwriters and actors were forced to leave the country. Many of them were accused by the so-called House Un-American Activities Committee of harboring sympathies for communism if not having once been actual members of a communist party.
In the spring of 1949, LIFE magazine published a list of fifty “useful idiots and fellow travelers” alleged to be propagating communism in America. The list, reprinted in Jekal’s book, is shocking for two reasons. For one thing, because the small photos under each name look like wanted posters for dangerous felons. For another, because the list of names included some genuine cultural luminaries: Arthur Miller, Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein, Leonard Bernstein and Thomas Mann being among the best-known in Germany. None of them, it goes without saying, has gone down in history as a communist subversive.
The incriminating list was created at a conference in New York, held by artists and scientists who wanted to put an end to the Cold War. These fifty individuals, writes Jekal, could be understood as a “blacklist” and at the same time as a warning: that anyone who employed them was aiding and abetting elements intent on overthrowing the American system, and that anyone supporting them was complicit in their crimes.
The message was heard loud and clear in Hollywood. In 1949, the year the Federal Republic of Germany was founded, a whole range of German-speaking emigrants pondered whether to return to Europe. Because the new rule in Hollywood was that anyone on the watchlist of the House Un-American Activities Committee would no longer be hired. A climate of fear began to spread: the fear of professional bans (many working in Hollywood were Jewish), denunciation, and the cowardice of an industry ultimately driven by the profit motive. Some, like the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, continued working, either writing under a pseudonym or having another, “untainted” writer taking credit for their work. But even stars the likes of Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich and Billy Wilder – who had lost his family in the German camps – were turned away for a number of years or only grudgingly employed. They, at least, were famous enough that they didn’t suffer financially.
Others, like the celebrated screenwriter Salka Viertel, had it harder. In the end she could no longer even afford to host her famous Sunday salons in Santa Monica, her “colony of the uprooted” as Jekal calls them. The rooms where Greta Garbo had once lain on the sofa while philosopher Theodor Adorno accompanied the multitalented Charlie Chaplin on the piano were now being rented out to strangers. Having previously been the benefactor of penniless new-arrivals in California, she was now forced to give acting lessons since she no longer got any jobs herself. The result was increasing isolation and loneliness. The bulk of her friends and acquaintances had passed away, Ernst Lubitsch and Arnold Schönberg among them. And so, Salka Viertel, who for years had been wiretapped by the F.B.I., eventually gave in – at which point it became clear that the post-Roosevelt administration was not only preventing her from living a life of dignity in America but also prevented her from leaving the country legally. Only in 1953, with the help of a lawyer Garbo had arranged for her, did Viertel manage to get out.
Playwright Bertolt Brecht and avant-garde composer Hans Eisler had both returned to Germany by then, in 1947 and 1949 respectively. Eisler would go on to compose East Germany’s national anthem. Brecht, together with Helene Weigel, would spend the best years of his theater career at the famed Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin. Brecht, unlike Thomas Mann, had never really learned English, and only made one film in America: the antifascist Hangmen Also Die! together with director Fritz Lang. Adorno, who left America in 1949, saw his famous study The Authoritarian Personality published there in 1950. According to Jekal, American anticommunism is treated in Adorno’s book as an “authoritarian mass phenomenon” just like European fascism.
And yet it was all over by 1954, fizzling out much faster than expected. Communist-baiter McCarthy had clearly overplayed his hand when he began looking for supposed communist spies in the ranks of the U.S. military and the Republican Party. This turned out to be the breaking point. By then the mood among émigrés had already hit rock bottom. Most had returned to Europe, where they had to deal with a postwar society in denial: a Germany that suddenly knew nothing of Nazim and where everyone was innocent.
Using a technique reminiscent of the film montage, Jan Jekal serves up scenes and anecdotes while using archival material to delve into the genesis of various works produced in exile. The result is a book that reads like a gripping Hollywood drama itself, though one that leaves a bitter aftertaste given the current atmosphere of political repression in the United States. The subject of Jekal’s book might indeed be history, but one glance at the Trump administration shows that a new campaign against supposed communists and everything “un-American” has long since been underway. And once again the European democrat feels disappointed in a nation that reliably had Europe’s back for decades, protecting it from the real enemies of freedom.
Translated by David Burnett
By Katharina Teutsch
Katharina Teutsch is a journalist and critic. She writes for newspapers and magazines such as: the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Tagesspiegel, die Zeit, PhilosophieMagazin and for Deutschlandradio Kultur.
