The Sun and Her Stars

by Donna Rifkind

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  THE ELIMINATION OF JEWS from every corner of German culture was one of the Third Reich’s most immediate priorities. By July 1933, laws prohibited Jews from taking any part in German film production. All Jews were summarily dismissed. As detachments of National Socialists paraded in full regalia and gangs of lesser thugs patrolled the streets with the intent to assault, studio employees from other countries began to fear for their safety. “Foreigner” was already a dirty word. Until recently, for American film representatives Berlin had been a prime posting, fizzing with louche glamour. Now the thrill was turning into fear. Reports drifted back to Hollywood of physical threats hurled at international cinema folk. Metro’s Berlin representative, a Dutch citizen and a non-Jew, left for Holland during the first waves of violence, then uneasily returned. According to a front-page report in Variety’s April 25 edition, Phil Kaufman, the British branch head of Warner Bros., was beaten by Brownshirts and found his house ransacked. He fled to Paris, then resettled in London, where the studio hastily moved its European operations base.

  Berthold wrote to Salka from Berlin: “One can really say that the world is coming to an end in Europe, or at least the biggest part of what was our world.” In another letter, he continued: “America is still a kind of luck for us, because if we were to have to go away from Germany now, we would go without any money or knowledge of English and without any international connection and experience. The fate of many immigrants will be a very bitter one, and it will be a question to what degree we saved ourselves from it.”

  Genuinely terrified for her husband—who was, in the eyes of the National Socialists, a perfect example of the degenerate cosmopolitan Jew—Salka sent cables beseeching Berthold to break his contract and get out of Berlin. But Berthold obstinately held his ground, insisting that Europa Film would not pay him unless he finished the screenplay.

  It took no less than the Reichstag fire, on February 27, and the subsequent decree suspending individual rights and due process which triggered a widespread wave of arrests, to pry Berthold away from Berlin. He fled to Vienna, stopping along the way in Prague, where he found himself among an eminent cast of fellow fugitives. Among them were Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Zweig, and Berthold’s colleague from the Europa Film project, Kurt Weill. Though their politics varied widely, until recently these artists had been celebrated by their fellows and around the world as standard-bearers of the great German artistic tradition, of the lineage of Goethe and Schiller. Now their very existence in Germany was illegal. Their common crime was opposition to Hitler’s regime, and all were abruptly stripped of their citizenship and its protections. All these artists, as Salka wrote, were now “expurgated from the culture of the Third Reich.”

  On March 22, the Dachau concentration camp began to operate on the site of an abandoned munitions factory, ten miles outside of Munich. It was the model for all subsequent Nazi concentration camps and would function continuously until its liberation by American armed forces in 1945.

  In April, the first general boycott of Jewish businesses began in Berlin. Storm troopers raided the boy bars and other night spots, and closed many of them. Speeches by Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbels poured out of radio loudspeakers in the squares, while people sat in the outdoor cafés and listened without comment.

  In May, Nazi-sponsored book burnings began in university towns throughout Germany. On Berlin’s Opernplatz, on the night of May 10, among the first to be hurled onto the bonfires were the works of Heinrich Mann and Thomas Mann, of Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Zweig, of Sigmund Freud and of Berthold Viertel’s friend Albert Einstein, and of the once-beloved nineteenth-century writer Heinrich Heine, whose 1821 play Almansor contained this prophecy: “Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn human beings.”

  On the Opernplatz, the Reich minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, backlit cinematically by the garish blaze and the chanting mob, was shouting: “The era of exaggerated Jewish intellectualism is now at an end!…You do well at this late hour to entrust to the flames the intellectual garbage of the past…From its ruins will arise victorious the lord of a new spirit!” A cry rose among the torch-bearing crowd: “See the black souls of the Jews fly away.”

  Any such writers and intellectuals remaining in Germany—most of them Jewish, but not all—faced arrest and torture in Gestapo basements. They would be lucky to be kept alive, and many would be sent to concentration camps. The linguist Victor Klemperer observed: “regardless of how much worse it was going to get, everything which was later to emerge in terms of National Socialist attitudes, actions and language was already apparent in embryonic forms in these first months.”

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  IN THE CONFIDENT BLOOM of another Los Angeles springtime, Salka wrote to Berthold: “Hitler is the triumph of the German Spiesser [philistine] and we will live to see his downfall.” Despite her brave words, her own situation felt precarious, if not quite as shocking as the atmosphere in Berlin. To avert a financial panic the U.S. government had declared a national bank holiday, which was in place within days of Roosevelt’s inauguration in early March 1933. The bank Salka used in Beverly Hills had already gone out of business. Providentially, she had stashed some of her Christina money in a stillsolvent savings and loan downtown. It was all that was left of her reserves. In the meantime, Metro had cut salaries in half to manage its Depression losses. Its writers began to organize into a guild, to the extreme displeasure of the studio management.

  On the evening of March 10, a 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck Long Beach, about thirty miles south of Santa Monica. It killed 120 people and caused widespread destruction; geologists have recently determined that it might have been caused by deep drilling in nearby oil fields. Salka wrote to Berthold that the aftershocks, which had lasted until dawn, were frightening. The chimney in their living room separated and shifted a full three feet away from the rest of the house.

  Early the following month, when Salka went to renew her lease, the estate broker mentioned that she could buy the house at a bargain price because the bank that owned it was under liquidation. 165 Mabery Road could be hers for $7,500, with a $2,000 down payment and a monthly installment of $75.

  Berthold suggested that they’d be safer buying a house in an earthquake-free zone, perhaps Austria or Ticino. But Salka decided that Santa Monica Canyon was as close to terra firma as she would find. Hitler’s convulsive screaming over the radio airwaves, along with her belief in Roosevelt, had turned her resolution toward the New World. She wanted her sons to become Americans and she herself had just taken out her first citizenship papers. She warned Berthold as well that his visa would expire if he did not return in July. Salka went ahead with the house purchase, using Berthold’s power of attorney to add his name to the deed. She took out a loan to repair the earthquake damage and installed central heating and a large guest room over the garage. “I was sure,” she wrote about Berthold in her memoir, “that after all his wanderings Odysseus would be pleased to have a home.”

  Salka knew that Mabery Road was only a facsimile of home, on the strange shore of a foreign sea. Their real Ithaca was receding into a toxic brown twilight behind iron doors. If Berthold was her Odysseus, in buying the house Salka was making a financial decision to cast herself as Penelope. She was putting down roots in Santa Monica for her own safety and that of her family. But just as vital was her obligation toward an extended family of the dispossessed. For them her door would always be open. She was a Penelope whose faithfulness was first to the ideal of refuge, because she knew that houses could be destroyed in a moment, and in her heart she was as much a wanderer as Berthold and nearly everyone they knew.

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  DURING MILD MAY EVENINGS the whole city of Los Angeles smelled of car exhaust and jasmine. Off the Coast Highway, the sea was a sheet of tinfoil in the cloudy mornings, then a tranqui
l Delft horizon in the afternoon sun. In the canyon, in their upstairs bedroom, the Viertel boys, dreaming of summer vacation, dawdled over their lessons and stared out the window at their sliver of ocean, visible just beyond the green glass shade of the student’s lamp Salka had bought.

  On Sunday mornings in the garden, Salka put on her round straw sun hat and tended her roses and tried to train her mostly untrainable dogs. Sunday afternoons were reserved for her at-homes, with a pot of Earl Grey and a cake always at the ready for whoever might drop in—the Garretts and their visiting journalist friends; the Alabama-born actress Tallulah Bankhead; the Viennese novelist Vicki Baum, whose two sons had become friendly with Hans and Peter. Sundays were also reserved for the New York Philharmonic’s radio concerts, and, if there was time, for books. Salka read the Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz’s “Bontche the Silent” aloud to the boys. The bitter folktale about suffering and helplessness moved them all to tears.

  At Metro, in the mouse-infested writers’ building, Salka labored away on Christina. Her hopes for the picture had risen now that Garbo was back from Sweden. The other good news was that Wanger had summoned the playwright S. N. Behrman from New York to work on yet another rewrite.

  Wanger liked to separate his teams of writers, especially after the unpleasantness of the Vajda dispute. But there was no keeping Sam Behrman away from Salka, who had known the playwright casually during Berthold’s days at Fox and who now, as she began to collaborate with him on the script, quickly included him within her closest circles. Like Salka, Behrman was an intellectual, an aesthete, and a collector of high-profile friends (Isaiah Berlin, Felix Frankfurter). He was a writer of sophisticated Broadway comedies who made a lot of money polishing Hollywood screenplays. His warmth and wit were among the chief joys of Salka’s years at Metro, while Behrman basked in Salka’s exuberance. The two writers earned credits together on three more pictures at the studio, gaining a reputation as “Garbo specialists.” They remained dedicated platonic friends for the rest of their lives. In their later years they maintained a fond correspondence (“Dear Salk”; “Dearest Sam”), designed to cheer up one or the other during periods of illness or melancholy. “As long as I know that you are well,” Salka wrote to Behrman in a 1964 letter, “I shall remain your Griselda, Heloise, Solveig, Penelope and, last but not least, your Jewish girl from Sambor.”

  Over long weeks, Salka and Behrman rewrote the Christina script yet again, reinstating parts of Salka’s original drafts which contained more historical fidelity than Vajda’s or Harwood’s versions. In all—and this was standard procedure for Metro’s big-budget pictures of the time—at least ten writers worked on iterations of the script, including the prolific freelancer Harvey Gates and the veteran writer Ben Hecht.

  Through the decades, there have been many attempts to discredit Salka’s contributions as a writer, not just on Christina but on all her subsequent pictures. These include Hedda Hopper’s allegations that Peg Le Vino alone wrote the treatment, and film historian Mark A. Vieira’s suggestions that Sam Behrman swept in from New York and single-handedly rescued Christina’s foundering screenplay with a major rewrite that more or less became the shooting script. Unless one was actually in writers’ rooms, it’s often impossible to know which writers contributed which lines or scenes to any Hollywood picture from this period. Comparing drafts of scripts is rarely illuminating. There are often multiple names on those drafts, and few records of specific attribution. Such is largely the case with Queen Christina.

  The assumption has survived that Salka was an inept writer whose script contributions were only marginal, and that the studio granted her screenplay credits in exchange for protecting Garbo’s interests. A look at the larger world context shows that the truth is more complicated.

  Queen Christina is a study in ambiguity. It’s about a monarch with fluid gender identity and sexuality, a girl who was raised as if she were a boy in order to step into the shoes of her dead father, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. As an adult, she counts both women and men as lovers and vacillates between duty and freedom. Ultimately she chooses freedom by refusing to marry and eventually by abdicating the throne. About only a few things is this sovereign unequivocal. She insists on peace in a time of war; she is a globalist among the xenophobes in her court; and she regards the arts and a diverse intellectual culture as more important to a civilized nation than militarism. All these things are true about both the historical Christina and her film counterpart. The Metro story veers from fact chiefly by having the queen abdicate for the love of a Spanish diplomat, when in reality she gave up the throne to convert from Protestantism to Catholicism.

  Among the picture’s early scenes is the lesbian frisson which Thalberg had asked Salka “tastefully” to incorporate, and which appears just as he requested. In fact, the physical interaction between Christina and her lady-in-waiting is nearly identical to two scenes from Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform: a genuflection and a passionate kiss on the mouth. Except for differences in the lighting—Expressionist and erotically enhanced in the Mädchen scene but more evenly glossy, as was Metro’s style of the time, in Christina—the similarity of the sets, camera angles, and action would have been evident to audiences who had seen both pictures. While the lesbian scene suited Thalberg’s commercial purposes, it was also a cinematic link—a lifeline, even—to the progressive sexual culture that Salka had left behind in Berlin, a culture which the National Socialists were now intent on destroying.

  In other early scenes, the bookish queen reads Molière aloud, admiring his cleverness, and later invokes the work of other such international “men of genius” as the painter Velázquez and the dramatist Calderón. When the nation’s archbishop warns Christina not to pollute the university in Uppsala with foreign scholarship (“To admit professors from Spain and Italy might corrupt the purity of our teaching”), Christina reproaches him: “The danger is not so much of corruption, milord, as of staleness. We need new wine in the old bottles.” She also makes repeated pleas for the value of the arts above the empty glorification of war. “The people follow blindly,” she says to her chancellor; “the generals will lead them to destruction.” And when a torch-bearing crowd, encouraged by a bigoted member of Christina’s own court, shouts slurs against the ambassador from Spain who has become her lover (“The queen despoils herself with a Spaniard!”), Christina insists on tolerance: “To the unreasonable tyranny of the mob and to the malicious tyranny of palace intrigue, I shall not submit.”

  Salka may or may not have written these lines of dialogue. But her sensibility is clear in all of them. All are speaking as much to the then-current crisis in Germany as to seventeenth-century Sweden. All decry a Germany dedicating itself to racial purity and anti-intellectualism as Salka was rewriting the script during the first half of 1933. In Salka’s memoir, she recalls that Queen Christina was one of the last American films to be shown in the Third Reich, and mentions pointedly that, upon its release, “Friends and strangers wrote to me praising it for its pacifist tendency and ‘abdication of power.’ ” Those central themes of the film—the rejection of war and the evanescence of state rule—are no less than a Weimar artist’s condemnation of the National Socialists’ martial power grab and an expectant prediction of their downfall. They reflect the sensibility of a writer who was receiving eyewitness accounts from her husband about the death threats in Germany to intellectuals, leftists, pacifists, and Jews, and about the thuggish repression of their ideals—the progressive, democratic ideals of the Weimar Republic which had nurtured the artistic missions of Salka and Berthold and their many well-known colleagues.

  The “pacifist tendency” that Salka cites in the film was one of the most reviled offenses in Third Reich ideology, which attacked Jewish and Communist revolutionaries for Germany’s humiliating losses during the Great War. National Socialists condemned as treasonous the suggestion that German troops might have been disillusioned about the noble cause of defendin
g their fatherland. In early December 1930, a theatrical display of the National Socialists’ crusade against pacifism was orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels during the Berlin premiere of Hollywood’s adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s pacifist novel about the Great War, All Quiet on the Western Front. Goebbels led a mob of Brownshirts into the theater, yelling “Judenfilm!” and other anti-Semitic abuse. Then the mob released stink bombs, sneezing powder, and live mice into the theater. It all sounds a bit farcical until the scene turned violent, with savage beatings of moviegoers who were presumed to be Jewish.

  By the time Berthold had reached Berlin, in early 1933, the National Socialists’ hatred of pacifism had become even more entrenched. One of the reasons Salka feared so for Berthold’s safety was that he was a frequent contributor to Die Weltbühne (The World-Stage), a weekly magazine serving as the organ for the pacifist left in Germany, a publication especially despised by the National Socialists and banned after the burning of the Reichstag. Christina’s pacifism bewails the crushing of all such opposition to the new fascist regime in Germany. If the picture was, as Salka noted, one of the last of Metro’s films to be screened in Germany after Hitler took power, it was also one of the last projections of a democratic-leaning Europe before similar visions and their visionaries were brutally repressed—before their world, as Berthold wrote to Salka, had ended.

  More than any individual scene, however, it’s Queen Christina’s overarching theme of ambiguity that gives it a defiantly antitotalitarian voice. In its final shot—one of the immortals in film history—Christina stares outward from the deck of a ship leaving Sweden, her throne abandoned, her lover dead, her future unknown. In preparing for the scene, Garbo asked her director what she should express, and the reply was: “Nothing…you must make your mind and your heart a complete blank.” Such blankness asks us to appreciate the unknowable, to celebrate mystery. It’s the opposite of propaganda: by remaining open to interpretation, it insists on freedom. It insists, as art always does, that nobody has total control over the narrative. And controlling the narrative is precisely the mission of every dictatorship. By choking off the free press, by intimidating and chasing out and eventually murdering artists and intellectuals—those “knights of the inkwell,” as Hitler derided them in Mein Kampf—the National Socialists suppressed all journalism, theater, literature, painting, and film that threatened their stranglehold on the nation.