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The Hitler family, from which also the motherly grandmother derived, belonged for generations into the dominion of Landgraf Fürstenberg, who resided on the middle-age castle of Weitra and managed the vast sourrounding forests. Born and raised in Italy, Santini became a historian of German literature and lived in Munich and Berlin before settling in London in the mid-1990s. Thomas Mann and Franz Werfel prospered in exile while most other writers failed; Ernst Toller, Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig committed suicide. The novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, who lost his houses and possessions in both Germany and France, regretfully wrote, “I never learned my lesson. I would always begin building over again, then cling spiritually and literally to what I had built, confident that this time I must surely be able to keep it.” By contrast, Vladimir Nabokov, who lost millions when he fled Russia during the Revolution, never bought homes in America and Switzerland. He knew he could never replace the grandeur he had lost and was fearful of losing everything again. Rifkind is] a superlative chronicler of Old Hollywood…This tour de force of a biography tells the story of an overlooked hero who helped make Hollywood’s golden age gleam.”— Shelf Awareness Two of Germany’s leading novelists had the good fortune to be away on lecture tours as the Nazis were taking over. On February 11, 1933, two weeks after Hitler became Chancellor, Thomas Mann travelled to Amsterdam to deliver a talk titled “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner.” A onetime conservative who had embraced liberal-democratic values in the early nineteen-twenties, Mann was attempting to wrest his favorite composer from Nazi appropriation. He did not set foot in Germany again until 1949. In the same period, Feuchtwanger, a German-Jewish writer of strong leftist convictions, was touring the U.S., speaking on such topics as “Revival of Barbarism in Modern Times.” He died in L.A., in 1958.

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A limited number of units were involved in the violence, said Wolfgang Schieder, a history professor and deputy director of the commission. Keeping that in mind, the German military formations acted all the more horribly, according to him. Marzabotto cemetery: Final resting place for massacre victims Image: AP The roots of Hitlers fatherly and motherly family reached into the lower-austrian Waldviertel, northern of Linz, from where all ancestors, that could be found, came. Mehrere Medien berichteten bereits im September 2015 über die Häuser: Die Bewohner des Villenkomplexes in Süditalien waren selbst überrascht, als sie feststellten, dass ihre Häuser von oben betrachtet wie riesige Hakenkreuze aussehen und der Link zu Google Maps viral ging.

Hitler’s personal life had grown more relaxed and stable with the added comfort that accompanied political success. After his release from prison, he often went to live on the Obersalzberg, near Berchtesgaden. His income at this time was derived from party funds and from writing for nationalist newspapers. He was largely indifferent to clothes and food but did not eat meat and gave up drinking beer (and all other alcohols). His rather irregular working schedule prevailed. He usually rose late, sometimes dawdled at his desk, and retired late at night. In her last years, Salka gave drama lessons and hustled for scripts. She suffered from Parkinson’s disease and died in Klosters, Switzerland, where Peter lived with Deborah Kerr. The Kindness of Strangers (1969), Salka’s vivid memoir and main source for this book, takes its title from Blanche DuBois’ famous farewell in A Streetcar Named Desire: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Rifkind’s biography makes clear that Salka was famous for dispensing kindness to strangers, rather than receiving it. Georg Grote, Hannes Obermair (2017). A Land on the Threshold. South Tyrolean Transformations, 1915–2015. Oxford, Bern, New York: Peter Lang. pp.417+. ISBN 978-3-0343-2240-9. Oft-cited in the margins of Hollywood memoirs by Charlie Chaplin and S. N. Behrman and in the footnotes of Garbo and Mann biographies, Viertel (1889—1978) was a combination screenwriter, studio whisperer, benefactress, connector, life coach and lay rabbi. Unremitting propaganda, set against the failure of the government to improve conditions during the Depression, produced a steadily mounting electoral strength for the Nazis. The party became the second largest in the country, rising from 2.6 percent of the vote in the national election of 1928 to more than 18 percent in September 1930. In 1932 Hitler opposed Hindenburg in the presidential election, capturing 36.8 percent of the votes on the second ballot. Finding himself in a strong position by virtue of his unprecedented mass following, he entered into a series of intrigues with conservatives such as Franz von Papen, Otto Meissner, and President Hindenburg’s son, Oskar. The fear of communism and the rejection of the Social Democrats bound them together. In spite of a decline in the Nazi Party’s votes in November 1932, Hitler insisted that the chancellorship was the only office he would accept. On January 30, 1933, Hindenburg offered him the chancellorship of Germany. His cabinet included few Nazis at that point. Hitler’s life and habitsNevertheless, even the most resourceful of the émigrés faced psychological turmoil. Whatever their opinion of L.A., they could not escape the universal condition of the refugee, in which images of the lost homeland intrude on any attempt to begin anew. They felt an excruciating dissonance between their idyllic circumstances and the horrors that were unfolding in Europe. Furthermore, they saw the all too familiar forces of intolerance and indifference lurking beneath America’s shining façades. To revisit exile literature against the trajectory of early-twentieth-century politics makes one wonder: What would it be like to flee one’s native country in terror or disgust, and start over in an unknown land? Learn about the economic and political crises facing Germany's Weimar Republic after World War I. (more) See all videos for this article During her marriage Salka gave in to her impulses and need to retaliate. She loved extravagantly and heedlessly, defiantly asserting her right to have sex with both women and men and to ignore the emotional damage she caused. She explained her love life by telling Isherwood, “if a man wants a woman enough, he can have her. Absolutely. It’s only a question of time and place.” Her first serious, two-year affair was with her screenwriter-neighbour Oliver Garrett. An open liaison, it was tolerated, if not endorsed, by their spouses, who ignored the brutti momenti and social constraints. Her next lover, in 1933, was the German director Gottfried Reinhardt, 22 years younger than the 44-year-old Salka. Throughout the next decade they were emotionally, physically and even professionally involved when he became her producer at MGM. Rifkind calls this a “civilised arrangement,” yet buried grievances, boiling tensions and deepening wounds caused bitter quarrels. Rifkind naively accepts Salka’s exculpatory claims that her three “sons were undamaged by their parents’ complex relationship” and soon “adjusted to the domestic changes, as children do, disregarding the opera buffa bed-switching.” But children who’ve experienced their mother’s adultery are often torn between loyalty to the older father and younger lover, and can be deeply wounded by the moral transgressions and emotional scars. Salka used her stage skills to act out possible plot turns in story meetings. “One of Thalberg’s favored Scheherazades” is how Rifkind describes her. The newly-minted screenwriter worked on many other scripts for the so-called “Swedish Sphinx,” including “The Painted Veil” (1934), “Anna Karenina” (1935) and “Conquest” (1937), and the original screenplay for “Madame Curie” that Garbo turned down and was reworked for Greer Garson. The programme of Italianization was particularly forcefully applied in schools, aiming at the destruction of the German school system. [7] As of 1928, Italian had become the only language of instruction in 760 South Tyrolean classes, affecting over 360 schools and 30,000 pupils. [7] Likewise, German Kindergarten were required to use Italian, while substitutes were forced to shut down. [7] German teachers were systematically dismissed on the grounds of "insufficient didactics", or transferred to the south, from where Italian teachers were recruited instead. [7] Degrees from Austrian or German universities became valid only through an additional stay of one year at an Italian university. [7]

The Seventh Army’s OSS Detachment Headquarters was located in a turreted chateau near Lyon, France. The elegant mansion contained an ornate interior with mirrored walls and period furniture. Other sections of the detachment were billeted in hunting lodges, villas, and convents throughout the remote mountains near Stasbourg. In her new book, Daria Santini reminds us that this epic migration — and its cultural impact upon Britain — had in fact begun earlier than many realise. Nearly 200 OSS agents were inserted into Nazi Germany from various locations during the last months of the war. They infiltrated the major Reich cities of Bremen, Munich, Mainz, Dusseldorf, Essen, Stuttgart, and even Vienna and Berlin. The Seventh Army OSS Detachment was the most successful in providing direct field support against Germany. It inserted 44 parachute missions behind enemy lines between January and May 1945. The total cost of penetrating the Reich was 36 casualties that included agents killed or missing. The return on the high human cost was precise tactical and strategic intelligence on enemy military and industrial targets that shortened the war in European Theater. Extensive programs for new rail junctions to facilitate the Italianization of Alto Adige (rail projects Milan-Mals, Veltlin-Brenner, Agordo-Brixen). Many of the refugees who fled to Britain from Hitler’s Mitteleuropa went on to make an important contribution to the cultural and intellectual life of their new homeland: artists and architects, musicians, photographers, film-makers, choreographers, writers, publishers, historians, scientists and many another.Viertel’s employment at MGM supported both her family and, by 1936, her unofficial ambassadorship to Hollywood’s mushrooming immigrant community. (Rifkind cites California historian Kevin Starr, who estimates that 10,000 from Germany and Austria left their homelands for Los Angeles between 1933 and 1941, “the most complete migration of artists and intellectuals in European history.”) Salka was the advocate of choice for immigrant artists, whether they were French actor Charles Boyer or composer Franz Waxman In the nineteen-forties, the West Side of Los Angeles effectively became the capital of German literature in exile. It was as if the cafés of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna had disgorged their clientele onto Sunset Boulevard. The writers were at the core of a European émigré community that also included the film directors Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Otto Preminger, Jean Renoir, Robert Siodmak, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder, and William Wyler; the theatre directors Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner; the actors Marlene Dietrich and Hedy Lamarr; the architects Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra; and the composers Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Seldom in human history has one city hosted such a staggering convocation of talent.