Homesick in Paradise

A dazzling and entertaining account of Thomas Mann’s exile in 1940s Los Angeles, at the center of a vibrant émigré circle that included Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, and Theodor Adorno

Los Angeles in the 1940s is a dream destination for European artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazism. They can hardly believe the play of colors, the light, the sea! Among those stranded in this paradise are Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, and Vicki Baum. But the king of émigrés is Nobel Prize–winner Thomas Mann, the Goethe of Hollywood. In Homesick in Paradise, Martin Mittelmeier presents a gripping account of Mann and his circle during the 1940s and early 1950s as the exiles party with Charlie Chaplin, Aldous Huxley, and Christopher Isherwood, talk and argue, have affairs, and work. Told through a series of memorable episodes, the book takes readers into Mann’s vibrant world as he struggles to balance the demands of art and antifascist activism.

To write the novel Doctor Faustus, Mann enlists musical help from Adorno and Schoenberg, but the titan of musical modernism is enraged when he later discovers that he is a model for Mann’s morally corrupt protagonist. At parties, Mann cries with laughter as the composer Hanns Eisler demonstrates Richard Wagner’s cheap musical tricks, and the novelist Alfred Döblin causes a scandal, and horrifies Brecht, when he blames Hitler’s rise on insufficient prayer to God. In other episodes, Mann experiences a fever dream during an operation, is charmed by Disney’s Snow White, and receives an awkward visit from a sixteen-year-old Susan Sontag.

A fascinating portrait of Mann during a pivotal decade, Homesick in Paradise is also an enthralling account of a time when Los Angeles became an unlikely center of modern European culture in exile.