The Salka and Berthold Viertel House at 165 North Mabery Road in

Santa Monica, California Santa Monica (; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Santa Mónica'') is a city in Los Angeles County, California, Los Angeles County, situated along Santa Monica Bay on California's South Coast (California), South Coast. Santa Monica's 2020 United Sta ...

, was the home of the Austrian screenwriter

Salka Viertel Salka Viertel (15 June 1889 – 20 October 1978) was an Austrian Jewish actress and Hollywood screenwriter. While under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1933 to 1937, Viertel co-wrote the scripts for many movies, particularly those starr ...

and her husband

Bertold Bertold may refer to: Given name *Bertold Brühaven, Teutonic knight from the then Duchy of Austria, Komtur of Königsberg from 1289 to 1302 *Bertold Eisner (1875–1956), Croatian Jewish law professor at the University of Zagreb *Bertold Hummel (1 ...

from 1933 to 1944.

Meeting place

Alongside

Lion Feuchtwanger Lion Feuchtwanger (; 7 July 1884 – 21 December 1958) was a German Jewish novelist and playwright. A prominent figure in the literary world of Weimar Germany, he influenced contemporaries including playwright Bertolt Brecht. Feuchtwanger's Ju ...

's Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades, the Viertels' house became a meeting place for the German intellectual emigre community and members of the Exilliteratur in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s.Los Angeles Preservation April 2014 newsletter
accessdate: July 1, 2022 Salka and her husband Berthold Viertel moved from Germany to Los Angeles with their three children in 1928. The couple had founded the Die Truppe theatre group in 1923, and facing financial difficulties, Berthold accepted a job to write for the couple's filmmaker friend

F. W. Murnau Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe; December 28, 1888March 11, 1931) was a German film director, producer and screenwriter. He was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Ibsen plays he had seen at t ...

.Jewish Women's Archive
Salka Viertel , Jewish Women's Archive
accessdate: November 19, 2016 Prior to their acquiring of the Mabury Road house, the Viertels had lived on Fairfax Avenue. The initial rent of the house was $900 for the first three months, then $150 after. Salka eventually purchased the house for $7,500 in 1933, its cheap price was as a result of a depressed property market in the wake of the

1933 Long Beach earthquake The 1933 Long Beach earthquake took place on March 10 at south of downtown Los Angeles. The epicenter was offshore, southeast of Long Beach, California, on the Newport–Inglewood Fault. The earthquake had a magnitude estimated at 6.4 , and a m ...

.Curbed LA
The Santa Monica House Where Greta Garbo, Albert Einstein, and Aldous Huxley All Hung Out – Curbed LA
accessdate: November 19, 2016 Salka's salons took place on a Sunday afternoon; guests included the writers Heinrich and

Thomas Mann Paul Thomas Mann ( , ; ; 6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novella ...

, the playwright

Bertolt Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a pl ...

, the composer

Arnold Schoenberg Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (, ; ; 13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was as ...

, the filmmaker

and physicist

Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...

. The book ''Jewish Women and Their Salons'' called Viertel's gatherings "An outpost of Mitteleuropa, with its conversational tone and home-cooked meals". Non German speaking emigre guests included the British writer Aldous Huxley, actor and filmmaker

Charlie Chaplin Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin Jr. (16 April 188925 December 1977) was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, the Tramp, and is consider ...

. The English playwright and writer

Christopher Isherwood Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood (26 August 1904 – 4 January 1986) was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include '' Goodbye to Berlin'' (1939), a semi-autobiographical ...

lived above the Viertel's garage with his "rough trade lover" William Caskey from 1945 to 1947 before their travels in South America. On August 1, 1943 several exiles gathered at the Viertel's house to draft a statement in support of the

National Committee for a Free Germany The National Committee for a Free Germany (german: Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland, or NKFD) was a German anti-Nazi organization that operated in the Soviet Union during World War II.The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occ ...

that had been formed in Russia. A statement was eventually agreed after several hours discussion, though according to Brecht's diary, Thomas Mann later withdrew his support from it as he feared it being seen as a "stab in the back" by the Allied forces fighting Germany due to the intense patriotism of its wording. Salka was added to an FBI Watch List in 1942, and added to an index of Communists by the American government in 1951 in the midst of the

Red Scare A Red Scare is the promotion of a widespread fear of a potential rise of communism, anarchism or other leftist ideologies by a society or state. The term is most often used to refer to two periods in the history of the United States which ar ...

. The Viertels divorced in 1944, Berthold moved back to Europe in 1949 and in 1953, a passport application by Salka to visit him was denied as a result of her alleged Communist sympathies. Salka eventually moved to Switzerland to live with her son, Peter, and his wife

Deborah Kerr Deborah Jane Trimmer CBE (30 September 192116 October 2007), known professionally as Deborah Kerr (), was a British actress. She was nominated six times for the Academy Award for Best Actress. During her international film career, Kerr won a G ...

. The Swedish actress

Greta Garbo Greta Garbo (born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson; 18 September 1905 – 15 April 1990) was a Swedish-American actress. Regarded as one of the greatest screen actresses, she was known for her melancholic, somber persona, her film portrayals of tragedy, ...

was a frequent guest and first met her lover Mercedes de Acosta at a party at the house. Salka Viertel's emigre years in California were documented in her 1969 memoir ''The Kindness of Strangers''. In May 2015 the house was put up for sale for $4.595 million, it was the first time the house had been for sale since the 1970s.

References

{{coord, 34.028408, -118.515887, type:landmark_globe:earth_region:US-CA, display=title Berthold Viertel Exilliteratur German-American culture in California History of Santa Monica, California Houses in Los Angeles Buildings and structures in Santa Monica, California

Meeting place

See also

References