Part of yesterday's panels at the conference were dedicated to the stage experienc, and again the people talked about ranged from the world famous (Brecht and Charles Laughton, William Dieterle) to the less known today (cabaret star Stella Kadmon) to the unknown (actor Hans Wengraf, scriptwriter Ernst Neubach). About Brecht's American exile I knew a great deal beforehand, but the recounting remains fascinating. Brecht's diary entries and poetry about Los Angeles in general and Hollywood in particular are on the one hand unfair, but on the other reliably witty; he was in fine verbal form, whether he was reviling Thomas Mann or the Californian air ("without a smell"). There was, however, one aspect of living in America which he really loved and enjoyed and that was his collaboration with Charles Laughton on Galileo Galilei. He had written the first version of his play about Galilei in Denmark but was dissatisfied with it. The second one, with Laughton, took two years to create. Since Charles Laughton didn't speak a single word of German, Brecht translated every single sentence himself (and Brecht's English was, err, not stellar), then played the line as he imagined it to Laughton, then Laughton took the line, refined the English and played it out to Brecht till Brecht was satisfied. They were such an odd couple, you have to imagine; Laughton was "a fleshy mountain of a man who placed himself in my way until I was driven to give my best" as Brecht put it, and Bert Brecht small, angular, thin, and usually all bite. Brecht called it "the translation of gestures", and despite his ego, he was aware that Laughton, whose film career was at its height, putting himself at Brecht's disposal for such a long time was a declaration of passionate belief of an actor into a playwright. There is a poem of Brecht's about working with Laughton which is among my favourites of his, as it also conjures up the entire exile situation, and their mutual awareness that the towns in their respective countries - Germany and England - were bombed by each other while they were in California trying to create a play.

The great loss: that nobody ever filmed this production. Though Laughton recorded some of the monologues for Brecht in New York later.

Stella Kadmon, who was the director and main star of the Viennese cabaret "Zum Lieben Augustin" pre-1938 was someone whose name I had heard before, but I had been unaware of her dramatic life story. First, she made it with her brother and mother to Yugoslavia, and they got visa for Palestine, but back then you had to pay 150 pounds per visum at the British consulate and they didn't have the money, so the brother and mother went first and Stella remained in Yugoslavia for some months longer, until her Yugoslavian relations, all of whom later died in camps, had collected the the money for the last visum. Once in Palestine, she started to learn Hebrew but had to make a living in the meantime, so without actually speaking the language yet, she had her cabaret program translated into Hebrew and learned it phonetically. This worked at early performances, but remained frustrating to her, so she switched to a mixture of Hebrew and German songs and acts, and finally got permission for productions entirely in German (this was a problem during WWII in Palestine, as you can imagine) if she did them on her own rooftop. Her German-language productions weren't an exercise in nostalgia; her main text writer pre-Nazis, for example, had ended up in a concentration camp, like many others, and using his texts, she wanted to keep his work alive as the idea of him and the others having vanished without a trace was horrifying. Finally there was a bomb attack on her cabaret/theatre in 1946, which was when she left Palestine again and returned to Europe.

In contrast to this, the actor Hans - later John - Wengraf, like Stella Viennese in origin, made the language and to a degree identity change exile demanded wholeheartedly. He went first to England and then the US, learned English relatively quickly and had no plans of ever returning (ultimately, he made visits post - WWII, but no more than that). He kept getting work, too, though he resigned himself to the fact that no matter how fluent in English he became, he'd always be cast in foreigner roles (not just the evil Nazi roles most of the emigrated German actors ended up with in Hollywood - anything between Sicilian bandits and Polish counts); but, wrote the irrepressibly optimistic Wengraf, "there isn't a single role I haven't enjoyed playing". Basically, that rarity, a happily assimilated emigré - who nonetheless wrote his memoirs in German, which given his dedication to adopting an English language identity surprised his family not a little.

In the evening, we saw a rare film in the rather magnificent Metro cinema (which used to be a theatre and still looks like one): Max Ophül's adaption of Goethe's Werther from 1938, which in one respect is a typical exile film - the actors are all French, the director, scriptwriter, composer/arranger of music (he stole a lot from Schubert and Mozart), cinematographer etc. were German. Though Ophüls had been granted French citizenship just two months before the film was released. The guy who introduced the film, Dimitri Vezyroglou (a lecturer on the history of cinema at the Sorbonne), started his speech by saying that one myth about Ophüls isn't true, that he wasn't Austrian originally but German. The mostly German audience of the conference looked back confused in a "we knew that" way, and someone asked why the French thought Ophüls was Austrian to begin with. Quoth Monsieur Vezyroglou: "Because of the lightness of touch, the sweetness of tone. People couldn't believe he was German."

(I swear, being associated with sweet lightness is the biggest con the Austrians ever pulled. Trufax: the exile director most often called "Prussian" and thought of as quintessential German/disciplinarian in Hollywood, Fritz Lang, who really was a fiend for discipline and hated it if actors didn't hit their marks exactly, was a native from Vienna and as Viennese as they come. On the other hand, Ernst Lubitsch, master of comedies and certainly of a light touch (Ninotchka, anyone?), was a Berliner, and as a child of Berlin most certainly a Prussian. And let's not get into how Prussia was only a part of Germany and the Rhinelanders and us South Germans have different traditions anyway.*g*)

Anyway, Ophül's Werther isn't exactly a lost masterpiece. I mean, it has great lighting, some charming sequences, and you can spot it's an Ophüls movie a mile away, but not only does it have little to do with Goethe (if anything, it adapts Massenet's opera, especially the quintessential change from Lotte as one of the most robust novel heroines who likes Werther as a friend and feels a bit attracted to him, but is happy in her marriage and in love with her husband, to a pining damsel who gets into hysterics because she is in love with another man), but it's not that convincing a film in its own right. And is stuck with a leading man who was 43 at the time, which is of course two decades older than Werther is supposed to be. However, there is something very endearing in the attempt to adapt a German classic for French cinema in 1938 as a way to show there isn't just Hitler's Germany. The most original sequence is probably the one where Werther and his rival Albert discover they are both readers of Rousseau, and not of the novels, either, but of Le Contract Social, and start quoting statements about the necessity of liberty to each other. This earnest appeal to cinema audiences in 1938 leaves you with a pang, and makes it impossible to begrudge Ophüls anything.