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It would be great to go and listen.
Thursday, I was doing deliveries in San Francisco. On South Van Ness, I doubled parked to unload a new power chair to a city run hotel for the indigent with the seedy smokers and day drinkers out front on the sidewalk milling around. The prison-clerk-receptionist yelling loudly, ``Hey, you over here, sign in..'' Weimar, Adorno, Mann, seemed a long ways away.
Maybe that's not true. Berlin Alexanderplatz was certainly nearby. What amazes me is how completely open and friendly the lowest of the low are. The street is their living room. Maybe it's my age and street outfit. Some guy patiently waits while I finish with the delivery and set up in the almost empty lobby. I go over to him to see what he wants. He introduces himself and I vaguely remember his name on some form. But I remember I have never been able to get a hold of him. He has no phone and is moved around from one of these city run hotels to another. He's been trying to get some equipment and has never been re-contacted, so I write his name and the hotel phone number down.
The above quote hints at an enormously complex topic and it doesn't break down easily. I was going to finish the last sentence, ``Bahr shows how this community of exiles reconstituted modernism in the face of the trauma of moving to Los Angeles...''
The problem is I don't know near enough to come up anything. One point I do see is that Mann et al were the intellectual elite and of a very high order at that. LA had nothing like that level of cultural development or achievements. It must have been a great shock to the local Hollywood set that they had just been invaded by the haute culture European giants. But these Germans must have been equally as shocked as they encounter such a vast city, run almost exclusively by their inferiors---and in a place were nobody knew or cared who they were.
What I really wonder at is the confrontation between a theoretical modernity, the high advancement of Weimar, when it is suddenly confronted with the reality of the future, Los Angeles. LA was already modernity made concrete. Modern art, architecture, and design had already been embodied and transformed into a complete style of life, lived by millions, hour to hour, and had already been through several permutations of fashion where every few years something else was new and modern, and what had been so modern, just years before was now suddenly older than the 19thC---which was so dead, it was now the icon of all times passed. Time speeded up like 20s newreels spinning off their cogs. Nothing could be torn down fast enough, so that half a street would look like a brick movie set from another age, while the next half of the street was all solid glass and aluminum. Atonal works that were high modernist expressionism in the 20s where now stardard almost hack movie sound tracks to add a creepy feeling at special psychological moments, etc, etc. Doug played an early string quartet of Adorno's this morning on his radio show. It sounded like the musical Oklahoma gone insane.
I wrote a long rambling post last night that tried to sketch out something, but I deleted this morning. It didn't address the point of what was the influence of LA on this cultural elite? The Mann's loved their house in Pacific Palisades and their friends and German visitors to their circle. But there is never any mention of the millions of working and middle class masses who resided just a few miles out of the Santa Monica mountains. Judging from a map, they lived at the far western end of West Sunset Blvd. I only remember driving along that end of Sunset a very few times. As I remember it, it twisted and turned a lot and it was lined with intersecting cul de sacs and very rich homes and mansions. They clearly lived in a different world.
I took a short break from my Weimar history reading, and switched to Katia Mann's Unwritten Memories and now Golo Mann's Reminiscences and Reflections. Golo Mann is a good non-fiction writer and is so far the best of the Mann litter. Or, let me put it this way, I like his style and movement back and forth between past and present. On the other hand he is a bit of a fuddy-duddy. I am in the Salem chapter which covers Kurt Hahn and an early `child centered' progressive education movement for adolescents. In Golo's case it was an escape from home, be on his own, learn to camp, go hiking, bicycling tours, in between classical education studies, lots of poetry, drama, physical education classes and the like. There is even mention of Paul de la Garde a subject of one of Strauss's early essays. He was evidently a well known anti-semite, but according to GM, he also wrote poetry. Golo's reflections are a great insight into the milieu that Strauss also inhabited on a more common place level as a petite bourgeoisie just before WWI and that Golo found more developed during Weimar.
Reading up on Hahn in Wiki, I see Hahn's ideas were transformed into the Outward Bound movement, which now has a certain celebrity as a rescue mission for `troubled youth'---and since morphed into the absurd reality tv shows.
I actually subscribe a little to Hahn's ideas, having been a part time hanger on in the disability recreation scene in Berkeley in the early 80s. We used to take disabled kids and young adults out to the Sierras or down the Stanisiaus on river rafting, and cross-country skiing near Tahoe etc. It's pretty funny to think about getting blind kids to go rock climbing---but man oh man is it a thrill to watch kids start off full of anxiety and then suddenly burst into happiness and glee at the top. That's one of the times I realized that true joy is extraordinarily rare.
This brief recreation period in my life was a great coincidence since I was a half time parent and my son was with me. I could take him along and he enjoyed the activities and became a good camper, learned to share, learned to help out with camp chores and make himself available when needed... In the degraded Reagan years of celebrating primal greed and selfish accumulation, these simple childhood experiences went a long way toward developing the personal antidote, with no lectures from Dad.
Now looking back at him as a boy, and then as a father it is amazing to me, how important and how necessary such simple things like learning to share, learning to be responsible to a larger group, willing to fit into places assigned rather than desired comes back around to be such important themes as a parent. I get to see the good little camper came back as the careful father and good doctor. That is a much deeper and more prolonged joy I never would have guessed or suspected in advance.
CG