CITY

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Q U A R TZ

Paris one can watch street life in a leisurely manner, are missing. . . . At night the illuminated portraits of movie stars stare down from lampposts upon crowds dressed in fake European elegance - a declaration that America yearns to be something other than American here. . . . Yet, in spite of the artists, writers and aspiring film stars, the sensibility of a real Montmartre, Soho, or even Greenwich Village, cannot be felt here. The automobile mitigates against such a feeling, and so do the new houses. Hollywood lacks the patina of age.75

This notion of counterfeit urbanity, which, as we have seen, was already a clich in the Menckenite critique of Los Angeles, would be further elaborated in the writing of the exiles (some of whom, presumably, were disembarking at San Pedro as Professor Wagner, maps in hand, was returning to his academic sinecure in the Third Reich). The contemporary adventures in hyperreality of Eco and Baudrillard in Southern California, which have caused such a stir, strictly follow in these earlier footsteps. For example, in the German version of his Hollywood book, Shadows in Paradise, Erich Maria Remarque perfectly anticipated Eco and Baudrillards idea of the city as simulacrum:
Real and false were fused here so perfectly that they became a new substance, just as copper and zinc become brass that looks like gold. It meant nothing that Hollywood was filled with great musicians, poets and philosophers. It was also filled with spiritualists, religious nuts and swindlers. It devoured everyone, and whoever was unable to save himself in time, would lose his identity, whether he thought so himself or not.76

But for most exiles the perceived lifelessness of the city grew to even more unbearable proportions once one left the Parisian stage-set of Hollywood Boulevard. Remarque reportedly fled from Los Angeles because he could not enjoy himself during his customary morning walk. Empty sidewalks, streets and houses were too redolent of the desert from which Los Angeles originally had been conjured.77 For his part, Hanns Eisler denounced the dreadful idyll of this landscape, that actually has sprung from the mind of real-estate speculation because the landscape does not offer much by itself. If one stopped the flow of water here for three days, the jackals would reappear and the sand of the desert.78 Yet not all Europeans were estranged by either the faade or the desert behind it. Aldous Huxley - part of a Bloomsbury set of expatriate British

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