Creativity is often the product of a creative artist or thinker meeting his or her peer – sometimes an artist from an entirely different medium. The exchange of ideas can lead to a burst of creativity that would not have been possible without the encounter. Throughout Euopean history is has often been the role of brilliant women to act as a catalyst for these encounters – usually through organizing Salons.The most famous and powerful of these women was undoudtedly Madam de Stael. But there are others that deserve recognition and appreciation. The Jewish Museum in New York City has a fascinating exhibit: The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons which runs until July. The exhibit has documents and paintings from the great salons in Europe, but ends with the California salon of Salka Viertel ,friend (lover?) of Greta Garbo, who brought together the German emigre community and Hollywood. The New York Times mentiions this in its review of the exhibit:
Viertel was a successful Austrian actress and protégée of the great
director Max Reinhardt. After Hitler’s rise to power, she fled Europe
and settled in Southern California, where she became a screenwriter and
coach for Greta Garbo. The prospect of Hollywood studio work and the
mild weather attracted many other German-speaking writers, artists and
intellectuals, and they came in droves after it was no longer safe to
remain at home.In the case of men like Bertolt Brecht and
Heinrich Mann, they arrived with little beyond the tattered remains of
reputations once great in Europe. Under such conditions, the gatherings
at Viertel’s home in Santa Monica, just a few blocks from the ocean,
were much more than salons. They were life rafts in the form of a few
cherished hours of speaking in a native tongue, commiserating with
friends and compatriots. Ultimately they were also a moving attempt to
protect a liberal vision of German culture at the very moment it was
being so gruesomely perverted on the world stage.
It’s hard to imagine a gathering that would include Werfel, Feuchtwanger, Brecht, the Manns, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alfred Döblin – artists who never would have met voluntarily in Europe. Viertel wrote about this amazing salon in her 1969 autobiography: The Kindness of Strangers (in German: Das unbelehrbare Herz: Ein Leben mit Stars u. Dichtern des 20. Jahrhunderts – 1987). But the final story of how her salon and the Weimar emigres changed Hollywood (and were themselves changed) has yet to be told.
