The Sun And Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler's Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood

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Meanwhile, at her house in Santa Monica she opened her door on Sunday afternoons to scores of European émigrés who had fled from Hitler—such as Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and Arnold Schoenberg—along with every kind of Hollywood star, from Charlie Chaplin to Shelley Winters. Much of it came from Europe, through the work of successive waves of immigrants during the first half of the twentieth century.

While under contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1933 to 1937, Viertel co-wrote the scripts for many movies, particularly those starring her close friend Greta Garbo, including Queen Christina (1933) and Anna Karenina (1935). Both predicaments had come about through a larger political context, but they were not, in the end, a political story. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Such vituperation may seem extreme toward a woman who titled her memoir The Kindness of Strangers and who is remembered, if at all, for inviting people to parties on Sunday afternoons. Etsy’s 100% renewable electricity commitment includes the electricity used by the data centers that host Etsy.

They settled in Santa Monica in a large home that became a beacon of hope, a safe house, for Jewish refugees. For 30 years in Hollywood Viertel gave more than she could afford of her time and money, much of the latter generously donated to the European Film Fund. Several were later investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee for their alleged communist sympathies.

Whether famous or not, though, all of them recognized that they could no longer live in a Europe under Nazi rule. Despite her success on German and Austrian stages, Salka Viertel was only modestly successful as an actor in movies. If the opposite was true as well, that Garbo may have seen Salka onstage when the former was in Berlin during the mid-1920s, Rifkind does not say.