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The Unifying Aspects of Cultures

SECTION:

Twentieth-Century Austrian Authors as Examples of the Unifying Aspect of Cultures

Gertraud Steiner Daviau (The Federal Chancellery of Austria)
Weimar on the Pacific: Salka Viertel's Salon at 165 Mabery Road, Santa Monica

The actress Salka Viertel, who had come to Hollywood with her husband Berthold Viertel in 1928, soon became the closest friend, advisor and screenplay author of Greta Garbo at MGM. Salka's hospitable house in Santa Monica Canyon, across Highway 1 from the beach, served as the meeting place in the 1930s and 40s of the greats of emigration and exile such as Thomas Mann, Bert Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel, Gina Kaus, Gottfried Reinhardt, Max Reinhardt and Helene Thimig, Hans Eisler and many other famous and less famous Hollywood figures as well as American and British writers and filmmakers like Irwin Shaw, John Huston, Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood.

At the informal gatherings on Sunday afternoons, Salka's Jour Fixe, one might perhaps catch a glimpse of Garbo in person, possibly also get a job at a studio, perhaps exchange news about the course of the war in Europe and discuss suitable themes for films and books. In this way a great deal of European cultural material, both literary and musical, found its way into the film studios of Hollywood.

THE UNIFYING ASPECTS OF CULTURES