The Sun And Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood

Product Information

Martin Sauter’s Liesl Frank, Charlotte Dieterle, and the European Film Fund not only provides the first comprehensive study of the EFF but also properly credits Frank and Dieterle as the chief administrators of the fund—credit that has previously been granted to its more high-profile male directors, Paul Kohner and Ernst Lubitsch. Now, biographer Donna Rifkind engrossing biography of Salka The Sun and Her Stars reveals that she was much more than a professional confidant of MGM’s biggest international star.

Such vituperation may seem extreme toward a woman who titled her memoir The Kindness of Strangers and who is remembered, if at all, for inviting people to parties on Sunday afternoons. You would not discover that it was Nelly Mann who more or less carried her seventy-year-old husband Heinrich Mann over the Pyrenees in the stifling heat of an early October day in 1940 as they tried to evade capture and certain arrest. Queen Christina” (1933) ranks with “Camille” (1936) and “Ninotchka” (1939) as one of Garbo’s three greatest sound films. In The Sun and Her Stars, Donna Rifkind delves into the fascinating, complex life and work of one of Hollywood’s unsung screenwriting legends and emerges with a rich and illuminating biography, one that Salka Viertel herself would have undoubtedly adored. As to whether or not they were lovers, there is ample gossip but no smoking lipstick or other positive evidence, says Rifkind, who gives a literary shrug at this facet of the Greta/Salka relationship.Or that it was two women, Liesl Frank and Charlotte Dieterle, who carried out most of the paperwork-heavy, unglamorous, but effective rescue work of the European Film Fund (EFF) in Hollywood. Rifkind sees the worldly yet unassuming Viertel as at once an extraordinary character and a telling representative of something larger than herself. I read dozens of thoughtful, entertaining, even groundbreaking works about Hollywood in which women who were not wives, secretaries, or movie stars scarcely make an appearance. to speak out against intolerance, censorship, political inquisitions, and the curtailing of human rights in the name of national security—all seeds of fascism in the United States that threatened to sprout as poisonously as they had in Germany: in the end, none of this has been deemed thus far to be worthy of our attention.

For just one example, the following from the novel Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood, about his character Friedrich Bergmann, based on Salka Viertel's husband Bertholdt: "The face was the face of an emperor, but the eyes were the dark mocking eyes of his slave. Don­na Rifkind recounts Viertel’s life sto­ry fol­low­ing a fair­ly tra­di­tion­al chrono­log­i­cal path, with use­ful end­notes and a sprin­kling of pho­tos. Moving…brilliant…[Rifkind] performs an act of spiritual as well as cultural resurrection…Like the multitudes who came to 165 Mabery Road, you’ll be glad you met [Salka Viertel]. She contributed financially to a relief fund that assisted destitute German-speaking refugees in the film industry. While reading Rifkind’s extraordinary book, I thought of conducting an Oskar Schindler-type census of all the lives that in one way or other, Salka emotionally and financially rescued.W. Murnau and Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, who were being disrespected by the industry that acknowledged them as cinematic masters.

While biographical information may be scarce about, say, Charlotte Dieterle, or such women as Miriam Davenport and Mildred Adams, who worked with Varian Fry at the Emergency Rescue Committee, this excuse does not apply to Salka Viertel, who in 1969 published one of the earliest and, it turns out, the most comprehensive personal record of Hollywood’s affiliation with Europe before and during the time of Hitler’s rise. To enable personalized advertising (like interest-based ads), we may share your data with our marketing and advertising partners using cookies and other technologies. She kept giving and giving, welcoming European emigres into her home, offering them a true place of refuge in a world gone mad. Cari Beauchamp’s Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood ; Erin Hill’s Never Done: A History of Women’s Work in Media Production ; Evelyn Juers’s House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann ; and Emily D. They were devoted to raising a close family and brought their young sons to the US, who grew up as typical California boys, loving the sun and surf, and successful on their academic and own career paths.Many newcomers who sought employment in the burgeoning film industry had a limited command of English, were uncomfortable with the social informality of southern California, and felt alienated and humiliated by their loss of cultural prominence in Europe. Bilski and Emily Braun’s essay about Salka Viertel, “The Salon in Exile,” from Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation have all begun to fill in the blanks. Among them were actors and filmmakers Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, Ernst Lubitsch, F. Imagine this alternate history of movies: Had Hitler not become a political force during the 1920s and 1930s, Berlin rather than Hollywood could have been the epicenter of film. Vier­tel spent years work­ing on her mem­oir before it was pub­lished in 1969, most­ly in seclu­sion in Switzer­land, far from the upheavals of sec­ond wave fem­i­nism.