Émigré vs Exile Modernism and Architecture in L.A.

Join us in the living room of the Thomas Mann House for an insightful conversation between Volker M. Welter, an architectural historian specializing in modern architecture at UC Santa Barbara, and The New Yorker  music critic Alex Ross, whose research explores German-speaking émigrés and exiles in California and their influence on music, literature, architecture, and the arts in Los Angeles.

When influential German Studies scholar Erhard Bahr remarked in his seminal book Weimar of the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism, that the architects Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra “were, strictly speaking, immigrants rather than exiles,” the historian established the year 1933 as a significant caesura separating “immigrant modernism” from “exile modernism” in California. Many German-speaking professionals already immigrated to California in the 1920s and earlier to pursue careers and progressive ideas of modernism before the Nazis even came into power. The exiles, such as Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, or Bertolt Brecht, who arrived in California as refugees after 1933, often had a much different and less enthusiastic understanding of modernism after their traumatic experience in Germany.

When architectural history ponders the works and influence of German-speaking, Central European architects in Southern California, a much simpler trajectory is often discussed: Schindler and Neutra brought modernist architecture to California when the two came to the U.S. Subsequently, other German-speaking architects working in architecture in the Los Angeles area are evaluated in comparison with the two “masters.“  In sharp contrast, the works of those exiled architects who fled to California after 1933 are rarely considered at all. Recent scholarship on these architects suggests that distinguishing, analogous to Bahr, between immigrant architects and exile architects allows an astonishingly differentiated picture of the impact of German-speaking architects on Southern California to emerge.

In their conversation, Welter and Ross will explore the nuances around different concepts of modernism in California before 1945, as these transatlantic currents and theoretical frameworks did not only leave their mark on architecture, but can also be seen, discussed, and exemplified in film, music, literature, and the visual arts.