Newly arrived from Europe in 1939, Thomas Mann finished his novel Lotte in Weimar with words addressed to a celebrity: “Good god, Frau Hofrätin, I must say: To help Werther's Lotte out of Goethe's carriage, that is an event—what can I say? It must be written down.” Two years later, The New Yorker titled society reporter Janet Flanner's article about Thomas Mann in California “Goethe in Hollywood.” (Mann responded that every-other fact was false.) And with that the real and fictional journey through time and space from Goethe's eighteenth-century Weimar to the Weimar Republic's Magic Mountain and from there to Hollywood's mythical shores was completed.

In this forty-first volume of the distinguished series “Weimar Now: German Cultural Criticism,” Ehrhard Bahr ranges from the theory of Adorno and Horkheimer to Brecht's California work, from the architecture of pre-exile Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler to works by Werfel and Döblin, and from Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus to Schoenberg's late work. The book elicits some of the interdisciplinary pleasures apt to emerge from a look at a topic like this; but because it is more a set of loosely connected essays than the promised treatise on exile LA and modernism, it can be frustrating as well.

Bahr writes that his book is unique among studies of German-speaking exiles in LA because “the crisis of modernism … found a specific German answer in Los Angeles” (9). He cites Raymond Williams on modernism as a response to new media and border crossings (9). He uses Russell Berman's book The Rise of the Modern German Novel to think in passing about “fascist modernism, leftist modernism, and a modernism of social individuality” (11–12). In the book's first chapter he catalogues some of the arguments in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment and mentions Jameson's A Singular Modernity to talk about modernist defamiliarization (39–40). He writes about Brecht's California poetry as “a prime example of modernist poetics in exile” (104), but, oddly, does so in Bettina Englmann's postmodern context in which Brecht's “demand of realist literature was a demand for deconstruction” (104). He cites Ruth Klüger to the effect that modernism involves “‘in theme, a sense of doom and isolation, in form, a highly complex structure and a style that is not easily penetrable’” (190). And repeatedly he seems to sum up modernity simply as a movement in whose art closure is denied (21).