ABSTRACT
The arrival of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) in Southern California in 1934 marked a milestone in the region’s cultural history.1 After almost a year on the East Coast, suffering through the cold and damp of Boston and New York, he longed for a place with a warmer climate where he might spend the rest of his days.2 In joining a long list of health-seekers traveling to Southern California, he was one of the fi rst European exiles of the 1930s to venture so far west.3 He subsequently took an active role in what Erhard Bahr has recently called “exile modernism,” in which hundreds of refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria formed what Bahr refers to as a “Weimar on the Pacifi c.”4 Teaching fi rst at the University of Southern California (USC, 1935-36), then as a tenured professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA, 1936-44), Schoenberg in some ways serves as a model of the immigrant who succeeded.5 Yet this was by no means entirely the case; he struggled to achieve recognition and acceptance as both a modernist artist and an exile. This chapter argues that Schoenberg, like his fellow exiles, navigated between American support for European artists and a suspicion of those same artists, both on artistic and political grounds. This dialectic resulted in a troubled view of Heimat for the exiles and the reconstruction of homeland in the host country.
