The German Genius

him so much. 77
    Among the German émigré photographers, illustrators, and cartoonists there were Robert Capa, Alfred Eisenstaedt (the famous “Kiss,” showing a sailor embracing a total stranger on V-E day), Philippe Halsman, Lotte Jacobi, and Andreas Feininger. Otto Bettmann founded the Bettmann Archive, a celebrated library of historical photographs. They formed an exiles’ community with art dealers and publishers, people such as Karl Nierendorf, who specialized in the Expressionists but gave Louise Nevelson her first exhibition, Samuel Kootz (Hofmann and Picasso), Curt Valentin (Lipschitz, Beckmann, Henry Moore), and Hugo Perls (Chagall, Calder). Kurt and Helen Wolff published Kafka and Kraus in Munich before the war and Heinrich Mann, Erwin Panofsky, Robert Musil, and Franz Werfel afterward in New York under the Pantheon imprint. They collaborated with the Mellons, Paul and Mary, who had both been patients of Carl Jung. Their Bollingen Press was designed to introduce Jung’s ideas to America, though Jung’s interest in the East and in mysticism and Oriental religion meant that other titles, such as the I Ching , also appeared under this imprint. Schocken Books and the New American Library were also started by German émigrés, as was Aurora Press, which originally published books only in German, to be read by prisoners of war. The name was devised by Brecht, to symbolize a new dawn but also the boat that fired a shot over the tsar’s palace. 78
    L ENIN O VERBOARD
     
    Music and musical theater had crossed the Atlantic—both ways—long before 1933. American jazz had sailed east and Wagner in particular went west, to be reinterpreted all over again in the New World. 79 Of the three great theatrical figures of prewar Germany—Max Reinhardt, Erwin Piscator, and Bertolt Brecht—Reinhardt fared worst in America, his Broadway productions failing and his one film, A Midsummer Night’s Dream , proving a commercial flop, though as Anthony Heilbut says he drew brilliant performances from James Cagney (Bottom) and Mickey Rooney (Puck). In Los Angeles Reinhardt was forced to open his own school, where William Wyler and William Dieterle taught directing and Erich Korngold taught composing.
    Erwin Piscator was much more successful, though it was hard at first. When he first arrived in America, he directed the Dramatic Workshop at the New School, which eventually closed, as did two of the other ventures he was involved with, the President Theatre and the Rooftop Theatre. Despite this, the list of writers and actors who studied under Piscator is second to none—Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Ben Gazzara, Walter Matthau, Arthur Miller, Rod Steiger, Tennessee Williams, and Shelley Winters. In the so-called New Drama, Piscator introduced to the American stage Sartre, Kafka’s The Trial , and the music of Hanns Eisler. 80 Though he liked America, he was appalled by the activities of McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and, after being subpoenaed to appear in 1951, returned to Germany, where he directed Rolf Hochhuth’s Der Stellvertreter ( The Deputy ), his assault on the Vatican, followed by Heinar Kipphardt’s In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer ( The Case of J. Robert Oppenheimer ), a vivid modern American tragedy.
    Bertolt Brecht was in America for six years after exile in Prague, Vienna, Zurich, Russia, and Denmark. Ironically, although he had been much interested in, and influenced by, American culture, especially popular culture (such as jazz), in the 1920s and early 1930s, Brecht’s time in the United States was not especially happy, though he did produce one masterpiece, Der kaukasische Kreidekreis ( The Caucasian Chalk Circle ; 1948) . 81 His swagger had less meaning in the land of swagger, his interest in popular culture was less controversial, indeed it was the orthodoxy, and his hatred of the cult of popularity, his loathing for sentimentality—equal to Hannah Arendt’s—meant that although he didn’t care how he went down, his was hardly an attitude guaranteed to produce success. He thought America was the most “vital spot” on earth but also the site of the “ultimate horrors of capitalism.” 82
    Brecht was as much an anarchist as a Marxist at heart, but he wasn’t without his realism either. He threw his copy of Lenin overboard during the crossing to America, knowing it might interfere with his acceptance. And he journeyed to California because Feuchtwanger