To Be or Not to Be

Why was it that so many talented European film makers, actors, scriptwriters, composers, arid set designers ended up in Hollywood? This question has attracted a considerable amount of attention from biographers and cultural historians, but mainly to flesh out with anecdote an answer already known in advance. ¹ In particular, when writing about the exodus of people in the film industry from German-speaking countries, writers have their narrative emplotment more or less ready-made, for it is obvious that many were political refugees, first fleeing Europe because of fascism, then frustrated by uncouth and uncultured movie moguls and finally persecuted and witch-hunted by paranoid anti-communist senators in the USA. Prominently featured in this version of events are Fritz Lang and Bertolt Brecht, Expressionism and film noir, Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg, Marlene Dietrich and William Dieterle. John Russell Taylor's Strangers in Paradise can be considered the definitive account and classic formulation of the liberal—intellectual political-émigré thesis, in which the story unravels within aptly titled chapters, such as 'The Gathering Storm', 'Hollywood Left and Right', 'The New Weimar', 'Hollywood at War', 'What We are Fighting For' and 'How to be Un-American'. ² This canonical version does not lack either plausibility or testimony, yet nevertheless its self-evidence is deceptive. ³ In what follows, I intend to make the picture slightly more complicated, first, by extending it backward in time, and then, by coupling the political dimension with a second one: that of trade and competition, of contracts and markets. Finally, the anti-fascist war and the trade war have themselves a double in the cinema — the 'looking-glass war' of competing representations of identity and origin, where what it means to have a home and to have left it receives a further twist.