On the morning of the Palisades fireplace, Claudia Gordon shortly accepted that there was solely a lot she may do to save lots of every thing below her watch.
She helps handle the Pacific Palisades houses as soon as owned by Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, bestselling German writers who moved to Los Angeles within the Forties as a part of an exodus of European intellectuals fleeing the Nazis. They remodeled their residences into salons for fellow refugees and warned Individuals that what occurred of their homelands may occur anyplace.
Immediately, the Mann Home and Villa Aurora, which is Feuchtwanger’s house, are cultural facilities that supply residency packages for writers and artists whose work embraces the spirit of their former homeowners. The destiny of the homes was out of Gordon’s palms, as soon as it grew to become obvious that the Palisades fireplace was going to rage.
She did what she may to save lots of every thing else, coordinating with staffers to ensure everybody was evacuated from the houses. On the Mann Home, somebody grabbed the whole works of Goethe, in addition to Mann’s handwritten papers. Gordon and others took some work and a Renaissance-era Purim scroll from Villa Aurora however needed to go away hundreds of uncommon books and private mementos behind.
Again in her own residence, Gordon took solace and energy within the lives of the 2 males. She particularly considered Feuchtwanger, who refused to succumb to despair after dropping houses in Germany and France to the Nazis after which constructing a brand new life within the U.S.
“If the worst happened” and the Mann Home and Villa Aurora burned down, Gordon stated, “that’s what we would have to do” — begin over.
We had been standing exterior the glossy, two-story Thomas Mann Home on a Friday morning final week. Accompanying us had been the home’s director, Oliver Hartmann, and program director Benno Herz. Inside, high-powered air filters had been sucking out all of the poisonous substances left over from the hearth — the one harm incurred by the home, in-built 1942 for Mann and his household and bought by the German authorities in 2016 to reserve it from demolition.
“I never understood how a surgeon could operate for 20 hours,” stated Gordon, 55, who has been director of Villa Aurora on and off since 2002 and can be director of administration for each homes. “But now I know how it works that adrenaline carries you so far.”
She seemed on the Mann Home’s gleaming white exterior, which needed to be scrubbed down by hand after the hearth. “It’s never been so clean,” she stated with a tragic chuckle.
This was going to be an enormous yr for the establishments, that are funded by the German authorities. The Mann Home had a full program deliberate for the one hundred and fiftieth birthday of its namesake. Villa Aurora was readying for the thirtieth anniversary of its residency program. All occasions up to now have been canceled, postponed or hosted at different spots throughout L.A.
The Mann Home hopes to convey again its fellows in Might. Villa Aurora additionally survived however is closed indefinitely because it awaits its personal deep cleansing. However the two constructions are at the least standing. The houses of lots of Mann’s and Feuchtwanger’s fellow European refugees didn’t make it.
A room contained in the Thomas Mann Home, which is now a cultural heart. It survived the Palisades fireplace however stays closed because it will get a deep cleansing.
(David Butow / For The Occasions)
Herz, who joined the Mann Home when it began its residency program in 2018, stated the scenario reminds him of the COVID years.
“We’re a young institution,” the 35-year-old deadpanned, “but very experienced in crises.”
In 2023, I contributed to a German-language ebook the place writers had been requested to mirror on a function within the Mann Home that spoke to modern-day L.A. I targeted on a press launch hanging close to the staircase to Mann’s bed room that quotes him saying, “In times of so deeply depressing circumstances a harmonious home background is of great significance.”
Whereas writers like Mike Davis and Joan Didion had been rightfully cited as prophetic voices after the Palisades and Eaton fires, we must always take note of Mann and Feuchtwanger, whose phrases are particularly related in an period the place strongmen are on the rise worldwide and persons are escaping from failing international locations.
In his 1938 lecture “The Coming Victory of Democracy,” Mann stated, “Even America feels today that democracy is not an assured possession, that it has enemies, that it is threatened from within and from without.”
Feuchtwanger, in the meantime, was criticizing the Nazis as early because the Twenties, culminating in his Wartesaal (“The Waiting Room”) trilogy, a set of novels that tracked the rise of Hitler and the Nazis’ persecution of Jews and others. That led the Nazis to burn Feuchtwanger’s books and his imprisonment in France below the Vichy regime.
“There’s the artistic Thomas Mann,” stated Hartmann of the writer, who received a Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. “But there’s also the political Mann, waiting to be rediscovered by each generation.
“And for Lion,” the 47-year-old Hartmann continued, “for him it was so important to counter stupidity with reason.”
He led us across the Mann Home, as employees weaved round us with extension cords and ladders. Electrical tape and spray cans had been in all places. At one level, Gordon practically walked right into a plastic sheet that sealed off a hallway from the lounge.
We ended up in Mann’s research. Among the many books that remained was a duplicate of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” which imagined an America dominated by a fascist.
“It’s always dangerous to draw political parallels between the past and present,” Herz stated, “but Mann went from becoming an admirer of FDR to experiencing the political shift to McCarthyism.” He finally returned to Europe, after the Home Un-American Actions Committee and the FBI started to focus on him.
“The takeaway that always stays with me is that things can always change,” Gordon added. “Lion never dared leave the United States because he was afraid they wouldn’t let him back in. But he wrote about not having self-pity in that. It was his hope and expectation that exile literature would stand the test of time.”
Outdoors, 25-year-old Isaac Rosales was taking a look at a bronze plaque with Mann’s face on it. I requested if he knew who Mann was.
“I’m assuming he’s really important,” the Colton resident replied in Spanish. “We [workers] always ask ourselves, ‘Who must that man be?’”
I gave Rosales a fast overview, highlighting how Mann fostered a neighborhood for immigrants from the home that Rosales was now serving to to revive. The native of Mexico then smiled.
“L.A.’s always been a sanctuary for us, right?” he stated.
Charred earth exhibits how shut the Palisades fireplace got here to Villa Aurora, the previous house of famed German author Lion Feuchtwanger, who arrived in Los Angeles after fleeing the Nazi regime.
(David Butow / For The Occasions)
Gordon and I bid farewell to Hartmann and Herz, then proceeded to Villa Aurora on the opposite aspect of the Palisades. The capriciousness of the hearth shortly revealed itself.
An intact house complicated stood throughout Sundown Boulevard from one other that was utterly devastated. The fenced-off Palisades Village, which proprietor Rick Caruso had employed personal firefighters to guard, seemed eerily immaculate. We handed by a checkpoint manned by the Nationwide Guard and the LAPD, then needed to cease for 20 minutes on a slender hillside highway as a backhoe was unloaded from a flatbed truck.
The odor of smoke greeted us after we entered Villa Aurora, a two-story mansion initially constructed by the Los Angeles Occasions in 1928 as a mannequin house for a deliberate neighborhood. Ashes lined a visitor ebook opened to a web page with its final signature dated Jan. 6.
Lion Feuchtwanger and his spouse, Marta, moved right here in 1943.
“He had to show an affidavit that he wouldn’t be a burden on taxpayers, just like asylum seekers have to do today,” Gordon stated as we checked out historic photographs and walked by Villa Aurora’s expansive rooms. “Lion was lucky that he was a bestseller at the time.”
Feuchtwanger is just not as well-known within the U.S. as Mann, Gordon stated, however he’s seen as an necessary determine in Germany, particularly for thus brazenly and brilliantly opposing the Nazis as a Jewish man.
Gordon famous that Marta, by then a widow, climbed on the roof with a hose to save lots of Villa Aurora in the course of the 1961 Bel-Air fireplace.
“They speak to the ability to keep strength,” Gordon stated, “in the face of catastrophe.”
Portraits of German writers Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger and Bertolt Brecht dangle at Villa Aurora, the Pacific Palisades house as soon as owned by Feuchtwanger.
(David Butow / For The Occasions)
We made our solution to a second-floor workplace, which featured portraits of Mann, Feuchtwanger and fellow German exile Bertolt Brecht, in addition to a spectacular view of the Pacific. From a balcony, I noticed that the slope under me was scorched proper as much as the Villa Aurora property line. A lifeless eucalyptus tree nonetheless stood. It will likely be chopped down and changed into an artwork piece by a former Villa Aurora fellow to commemorate the Palisades catastrophe.
“That house over there is gone,” Gordon stated, pointing towards the space. “The other house is gone.”
She stayed quiet.
“We’re closed, but we’re not closed,” she concluded. “We’re still going.”
