Liesl Frank, Charlotte Dieterle and the European Film Fund. Martin Sauter

Taylor, besides writing for Sight & Sound, served in 1969 as jury member at the Berlin Film Festival. He was also Hitchcock’s official biographer and had already published a number of bio-critical studies, all revolving around Hollywood figures from the 1930s/40s, from which it is only a small leap to the topic of exile.¹¹ Taylor’s and Heilbut’s books share some striking similarities as well as some differences. Besides discussing the same subject matter and being published in the same year, they are both influenced by Salka Viertel‘s autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers, from which they frequently quote. While Heilbut focuses solely on German-Jewish emigration, however, Taylor’s book, echoing Baxter‘s, includes émigrés from other European countries.

      The scarcity of scholarly literature on exiled film artists at the time led to both books being at least consulted sometimes even cited by, scholars, and consequently both have their detractors as well as their supporters. Although his work is much more ambitious in scope, it is apt to introduce Jean-Michel Palmier’s Weimar en exile at this point. Published five years after Taylor’s and Heilbut’s publications, it resembles theirs inasmuch as it is also something of a hybrid between an scholarly study and a popular publication. Like Heilbut, Palmier draws on a number of sources, including archival data and oral histories. And it is no doubt these oral histories which sparked his preoccupation with exile in the first place, for they were all with well known figures connected to Weimar culture: Blandine Ebinger, Maria Ley Piscator, Lotte Eisner, etc. Nevertheless, Palmier also drew on secondary sources, since exile research at this point was yet in its embryonic stage, and archival sources were still relatively sparse.¹²

      In another parallel to both Taylor and Heilbut, Weimar en exile also remained Palmier’s sole contribution to the field of exile research before his untimely death in 1998. Palmier’s concern with exile derives from the fact that he was a professor of Esthéthique et des sciences de l’art at Université Paris 1/ Panthéon-Sorbonne. Weimar culture was his area of expertise, with his publications on the topic being numerous.¹³ It is precisely this culture, referred to by Palmier as ‘one of the richest [such] that it strikes us as forming an almost unique example’ (Palmier 2006: 17) which was lost following the Nazi takeover, prompting Palmier to embark on a monumental effort of memorialisation, ‘to remember their story’ (Palmier 2006 18).

      In Weimar en exile Palmier strives to cover the entire emigration, including film artists, writers, academics, and political refugees, as well as all the émigré hubs in such countries as France, Switzerland, the UK, the Netherlands, Turkey, and China. Palmier’s book is, in fact, a compendium of German-Jewish exile. This clearly sets it apart from most other studies on exile, and was in its time a far more ambitious undertaking than most previous efforts, including Taylor’s or Heilbut’s. Justifying his decision to take an all-inclusive approach to the topic of exile, Pamier explains that

      the scope of the subject, and its complexity, suggest that it should either be tackled collectively or that its scope should be very closely delimited (Palmier 2006: 15).

      Weimar en exile bears a faint resemblance to the Manns’ Escape to Life, and the frequency with which he refers to their book make it obvious that it served as an inspiration for his own work. Issues Palmier discusses - and which echo Escape to Life - include the events leading up to the Nazi takeover; Goebbels’ establishment of the Reich Chambers of Culture, what these various chambers entailed, how they functioned and, also, their well-known consequences for Jewish artists; anti-Nazi theatre in exile; émigré periodicals; the rise and fall of the Popular Front; the German Resistance; and the émigrés’ perspectives on post-war Germany.

      Although Palmier’s mission - large-scale and ambitious as it is - is without precedent, some sections of the book crash under its enormous scope. Clearly, Palmier is much more at ease discussing writers, politicians and academics such as Willi Münzenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, or Carl von Ossietzky, as his knowledge on - and probably interest in - them is that much more profound than that concerning film artists. Consequently, while Weimar en exile is a valuable research tool in many respects, it is also a warning sign that by expanding the scope the risk of inaccuracy increases. Certainly, in a move inspired by Horak’s examination of the impact of refugee film artists on Hollywood, the focus of exile researchers slowly started to shift from the mid-1980s on from a general to a more detailed observation of the influence the exiles brought to bear on the US film industry. This is manifest, for instance, in an exhibition held at the Max Kade Institute of the University of Southern California in 1986. While the exhibition covered the German-speaking emigration to Hollywood, starting with Carl Lammle’s arrival in the US in 1884, it nevertheless homed in on the years after 1933. While the catalogue to the exhibition identifies several areas and genres where the impact of émigrés on American popular cinema is palpable (e.g. the horror film, the use of film scores, the social problem film) the fact that exile research was still in its early stages is evidenced by the curator’s comment that after 1933, they could only detect one single ‘genre influenced by the Germans’ (Angst-Norwik & Sloan 1986: 9). This, of course, was film noir, although Paul Schrader - one of the first to link the émigrés’ presence in Hollywood to film noir - himself said that ’there is a danger of overemphasizing the German influence on film noir’ (Schrader in Belton 156: 1996), while film historian Andrew Sarris, for instance, claims that ‘[film noir] is very difficult to define or even categorize as a self-enclosed genre simply because it is largely a critical afterthought in film history’ (Sarris 1998: 104).¹⁴

      Besides the contentious issue of film noir, Horak and H.G. Asper would eventually identify other genres on which the émigrés brought their influence to bear (see below). Nevertheless, film noir - and the émigrés’ hand in it - has since become a major focal point for exile researchers and film historians. Two scholars to also highlight the refugees’ influence on this genre are Christian Cargnelli and Michael Omasta. In Schatten Exil - Europäische Emigranten im Film noir (Vienna: PVS Verleger, 1997), they contend that ‘one quarter, or based on other criteria one third of films noirs were made by directors from the Old World’ (Cargnelli & Omasta 1997: 9). However, their book does much more than underscoring the high émigré presence in film noir. Taken together, the contributing essays amount to a study of the lives and working conditions of the refugees in exile, using their impact on film noir as a basis. For instance, the chapter on cinematographer Franz Planer, who collaborated on a number of films noirs, tells of the ‘tricky undertaking [to attain membership in the American Society of Cinematographers]’ (Müller in Cargnelli & Omasta 1997: 156), thus drawing attention to one of the major obstacles the exiles faced: that of union membership. Another chapter examines the émigré contribution to films that are hybrids between film noir and anti-Nazi films. In essence, Schatten Exil underscores the degree to which American film history and exile research are invariably connected. Cargnelli and Omasta’s book is also a fine example of how exile research has evolved from the wide angle vision of its infancy to the narrow focus of today which allows for much more detailed scrutiny of, for instance, a particular genre or a particular group of émigrés.

      Another example to underscore this point is Josef Garncarz’s contribution to Phillips’ and Vincendeau’s Journeys Of Desire (London: BFI, 2006). Unlike Horak in Anti-Nazi-Filme der deutschsprachigen Emigration von Hollywood 1939 - 1940 (see below), Josef Garncarz’s preoccupation in ‘The Ultimate Irony - Jews Playing Nazis in Hollywood’ is not so much with the émigrés’ influence on anti-Nazi films, but the question of the motivation for them to star in these. Hence, rather than just gauging the émigrés’ input in anti-Nazi films, Garncarz - whose essay appeared twenty years after Horak’s trailblazing study - takes his examination one step further. This aptly illustrates the development exile research has undergone.

      While early publications on film exile like those by Heilbut, Taylor, but also those by Hilchenbach, Horak and Palmier suffered from a dearth of empirical data as well as a lack of reliable secondary literature, which often resulted in inaccuracy, their contributions were the fundament for what would become known as exile research. It is owing to those early contributions, which, as we have seen, were often overviews or compendiums on exile, that a more detailed and focussed examination of film exile has become possible.