An original take on Weimar Republic émigrés’ influence on Hollywood, and vice versa.
The story of cinema’s German and Austrian exiles in Hollywood during World War II.
In 2002, Swiss author and theater director Blubacher received a grant for a three-month residency at Villa Aurora, a 7,000-square-foot “Spanish colonial revival villa” in Pacific Palisades that was Thomas Mann’s house in the 1940s. That neighborhood, west of Beverly Hills, is now home to wealthy residents, many of them in the entertainment business. Sixty years before Blubacher’s arrival, the then-sleepy Palisades was where émigrés from Austria and Germany, including Mann, came to escape the Nazis and pursue a career in Hollywood. Blubacher’s objective during his residency and in this informative book is to investigate “the period when Pacific Palisades became ‘Weimar under the palms,’” when some of “the Weimar Republic’s most prominent cultural figures found their way here.” Among the figures presented in the book are the director Ernst Lubitsch, “who would become one of the most influential Germans in Hollywood” in the 1930s and 1940s; fellow directors Fritz Lang and Douglas Sirk; composers such as Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Hans Salter; and lesser-known figures such as Lotte Mosbacher, best known today as the “aged Holocaust survivor who recognizes the Nazi war criminal Dr. Christian Szell” in John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man. Some of the stories Blubacher shares are no less chilling for being expected, such as when Marlene Dietrich returned to Germany in 1945 to learn the fate of older sister Elisabeth and discovered that Elisabeth and her husband “had run a cinema at the Belsen barracks, where the murderers went for entertainment. Dietrich disowned her sister for the rest of her life.” But others are lighter and provide a welcome respite, as when Blubacher mentions that when Mann was taken around to many studios on his arrival in Hollywood, one of them was Disney, “where he was shown a Mickey Mouse film.”
An original take on Weimar Republic émigrés’ influence on Hollywood, and vice versa.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781684582877
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Brandeis Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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