Читать книгу Liesl Frank, Charlotte Dieterle and the European Film Fund - Martin Sauter - Страница 12

My examination of the EFF relies primarily on archival data, with secondary sources used to develop an interdisciplinary methodology that draws on film studies, social and political history, and critical biography.

While the opening of the Paul Kohner Archive at Berlin’s Deutsche Kinemathek has considerably facilitated access to empirical data about the European Film Fund,³⁰ the emerging picture is by no means coherent. A fraction of the EFF archive is irretrievably lost, destroyed by a fire in the 1970s in the Kohner household.³¹ The Paul Kohner Archive remains the most comprehensive collection of documents relating to the EFF. Yet I was aware from the outset of my research that this emphasises Paul Kohner’s own involvement in this organisation while eclipsing the input of its chief operatives, Liesl Frank and Charlotte Dieterle. To give the reader a picture of the issues involved in putting together an accurate picture of the EFF, it is worth tracing in some detail the history of my own research. The fact that so little had been written about the organisation made it impossible to conduct initial research in a selective way. Instead, I started by conducting a random search to see what my findings would unravel. As the majority of EFF papers are located at the Paul Kohner Archive it was there that I began. Sifting through the documents, letters, telegrams and audits, it became evident that the two main EFF contributors were neither Paul Kohner, who is credited with founding the organisation, nor Ernst Lubitsch, who was its president, but Charlotte Dieterle - wife of the director William Dieterle -and Liesl Frank, the wife of the writer Bruno Frank. While their role in the EFF has been mentioned in a number of publications, the extent of their contribution has never been acknowledged. Visits to other archives eventually confirmed my increasing suspicion that both women were at the centre of the EFF. Moreover, the fact that the names mentioned in the EFF files read like a who’s who of Hollywood’s émigré community, made me realise what a key role the organisation played in the life - and often the survival - of the exiles

The Kinemathek having supplied me with the names of EFF members, donors and beneficiaries, I had a lead enabling me to conduct a more thorough and focused investigation. However, I was daunted by the number of individuals involved in the EFF. As examining the papers of well over two hundred people was not physically possible, I had to devise a method by which to continue my investigation until a clearer picture of the organisation emerged. Assuming that limiting my research to the top donors and beneficiaries would facilitate gathering EFF-related information, I continued by running online searches regarding access to their papers. Lubitsch having been one of the EFF’s biggest donors as well as its president, access to his papers would have been crucial. However, the refusal of his daughter, Nicola, to grant access made this impossible. The Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles holds an - albeit small - Paul Kohner Collection and is also home to the John Huston and the William Wyler Collections, Huston having been a friend and client of Kohner’s and Wyler one of the EFF’s biggest donors as well as Kohner‘s friend and erstwhile colleague when both were still working at Universal. However, neither collection contained any significant references to the EFF. Lion Feuchtwanger, although not a major EFF donor, nevertheless granted financial support via the EFF to a number of refugees, Heinrich Mann and Bertolt Brecht among them, as I had found out during my research at the Kinemathek. This, then, necessitated a visit to the Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, which proved extremely useful, as the Feuchtwanger papers not only contained ample references to the EFF itself, but also further highlighted the contribution of Frank and Dieterle. The same was true of the Fritz Lang Papers at the Louis B. Mayer Library at the American Film Institute. The increasing presence of both women in all existing EFF files convinced me of the crucial role both appear to have played in the EFF. More importantly, however, Frank’s and Dieterle’s significance raises questions regarding the relative absence of women from literature on exile while at the same time confronting me with their omnipresence in a refugee organisation. The evidently central role of Frank and Dieterle within the EFF I now took as a cue to focus my research on their contribution. Thus, during all my subsequent archival visits I was particularly interested in all documents relating to their input. These archives included the German Literature Archive in Marbach, the M. E. Grenander Department of Special Collections at the University of Albany, as well as the Exile Archive at Frankfurt’s German National Library and the Center for Jewish History in New York, all of which are home to a wide range of émigré collections from erstwhile EFF beneficiaries. Additionally, while in Albany, I had the privilege to be granted access to Professor John Spalek’s private collection of émigré papers. As an exile researcher of the first generation, Spalek knew many refugees personally, visited them in their homes while they were still alive, conducted oral histories, and accumulated his own personal exile archive. For instance, in the early 1970s, Spalek corresponded regularly with Liesl Frank and her third husband, Jan Lustig, also an émigré. Spalek let me have access to their correspondence, which was an invaluable contribution to my research, as Frank’s letters to Spalek contain important information regarding Hollywood’s émigré community she and her first husband, Bruno Frank, were part of and, more crucially, intelligence about the EFF which would otherwise have been difficult for me to obtain.

The Academy of Arts in Berlin and the Archives in Ludwigshafen a. Rhein I visited, primarily, to glean material on Charlotte Dieterle. However, The Academy of Arts also houses the papers of Walter Wicclair and his companion, Marta Mierendorff, a sociologist-turned-exile-researcher. Her papers were also of inestimable help to me, not so much for the documents and letters they comprise, but more for Mierendorffs notes, which are filled with her observations and deductions regarding the EFF, a topic, it seems, she at one point intended to investigate, though, sadly she died before she could do so. Lastly, the purpose of my visit to the National Archives in Washington DC was to secure material regarding the US visa policy in the 1930s, as it is my premise that it was the strict US visa restrictions and the ensuing refugee crisis following Kristallnacht, which abetted the foundation of the EFF.