"As Bahr reminds us, the German exile community in Los Angeles was variously and fabulously gifted, and it included not only novelists, philosophers and composers but also artists, architects, psychiatrists and a great many actors, screenwriters and directors. For Bahr, the accident of history that placed Mann (both Thomas and Heinrich), Brecht, Theodor W. Adorno, architect Rudolph M. Schindler and other German-speaking intellectuals in Southern California turned out to be fateful and decisive. Precisely because 'so many canonical authors of modern German literature had lived in exile in Southern California and produced their major works here,' argues Bahr, 'Los Angeles could have served as an icon of intellectual and artistic resistance to the Nazi regime.'"
In the Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Kirsch reviews Ehrhard Bahr's Weimar on the Pacific.
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