In 2014, I received a grant for German Exile Studies from the University of Southern California to do research at the Feuchtwanger Memorial library. My plan was to do background research for a cozy mystery. I even had a title, Movie Night at the Villa Aurora. That, however, was not the novel I ended up writing.
I knew some of the male writers I studied in college literature classes found refuge in Southern California during the Nazi years. A few were employed in the Hollywood movie industry which I thought would be a great premise for a lighthearted novel. But I knew very little about the female emigres until I started digging around in the USC library archives.
When Marta Feuchtwanger donated her husband Lion’s papers to USC, she also included date books, address books and lists of attendees at her parties. I recognized names like Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin and Thomas Mann, but there were also names of women I’d never heard of. This sent me down a whole new rabbit hole of research, as I found the lives of immigrant women in California far more interesting than their husbands.
Lion Feuchtwanger was already a popular writer in the United States when he and Marta arrived in 1940. His American royalties allowed the Feuchtwangers to purchase the beautiful Villa Aurora estate in the Pacific Palisades where they entertained a growing German expat community. Lion followed a strict writing routine while Marta arranged all the details of their new life in America. He didn’t have to adapt to a new environment because he had a wife to manage his household and a secretary to take care of everything else. Lion died in 1958. Marta outlived him by almost thirty years. She spent her remaining years preserving her husband’s legacy as an eminent German author.
Marta was an amazing woman in her own right. She is one of many historically-based characters I include in the literary novel I wrote instead of my planned cozy mystery. In the coming months, I’ll be blogging about the research I did to write, I’ll Be Seeing You, which will debut September 20, 2027.