Villa Aurora
Sep. 6th, 2007 02:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakMy first reason for being in Los Angeles is to attend to a conference about the writer Lion Feuchtwanger (same reason I went to Sanary two years ago); the opening day was today, and as this year's main theme is "Feuchtwanger and Film", that was what the lectures were about. The most interesting one presented a Russian film based on Die Geschwister Opperman from 1939, which had the bad luck of being a film about a Jewish family in Germany in 1933 (which is when Feuchtwanger published the novel, one of his most urgently written books)... and opening just a short time before the Hitler-Stalin pact. At which point it became politically inconvenient for Stalin & Co. and was withdrawn from the theatres, and by the time the Stalin-Hitler alliance was forgotten, so was the film. The lecturer showed us excerpts, and despite some changes made from the novel (the young idealistic Zionist daughter of one character in the novel becomes the young idealistic Communist daughter, the family's chauffeur is changed into a working class hero lecturing his employer's son on the big picture), it seems to have resulted in a very intriguing film.
Meeting fellow Feuchtwangerians I last saw two years ago in France was lovely; turns out I'm the only one who was given a guest room in the Villa Aurora (where Feuchtwanger lived, and where I had a scholarship in 1995) for the duration of my stay in Los Angeles. Which is great for me, because the rest of them has to stay in hotels, and the Villa Aurora looks like this:
Feuchtwanger, one of the three German writers who actually had an audience in the US pre-exile and hence still had readers and an income when they ended up there, bought it in 1940 and promptly began to fill it with books, as he was an avid collector as well as a writer. Which is why the individual rooms look like this:
Feuchtwanger's study, where I'm sitting right now:
And then there's the terrace, where the best known picture of him and Brecht was taken on the evening of Brecht's HUAC-caused departure from the US:
The view one has from said terrace:
In conclusion: Feuchtwangerian scholarship has its benefits.*g*
Meeting fellow Feuchtwangerians I last saw two years ago in France was lovely; turns out I'm the only one who was given a guest room in the Villa Aurora (where Feuchtwanger lived, and where I had a scholarship in 1995) for the duration of my stay in Los Angeles. Which is great for me, because the rest of them has to stay in hotels, and the Villa Aurora looks like this:
Feuchtwanger, one of the three German writers who actually had an audience in the US pre-exile and hence still had readers and an income when they ended up there, bought it in 1940 and promptly began to fill it with books, as he was an avid collector as well as a writer. Which is why the individual rooms look like this:
Feuchtwanger's study, where I'm sitting right now:
And then there's the terrace, where the best known picture of him and Brecht was taken on the evening of Brecht's HUAC-caused departure from the US:
The view one has from said terrace:
In conclusion: Feuchtwangerian scholarship has its benefits.*g*
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Date: 2007-09-06 10:52 am (UTC)Enjoy your stay there!
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