The Villa Aurora, 520 Paseo Miramar, Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, has been an artists' residence since 1995. It is the former home of the German Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta. The Feuchtwangers bought this Spanish-style mansion in 1943. The house was a popular meeting place for artists and the community of German-speaking émigrés. Lion Feuchtwanger wrote six of his historical novels in this house: The Day Will Come, Proud Destiny, The Jewess of Toledo, Tis folly to be wise, Jephthah and his Daughter, and This is the Hour.
Today, the villa is operated by two institutions: the Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e.V., situated in Berlin, and the Friends of Villa Aurora Inc. in Los Angeles. It offers fellowships for artists-in-residence to stay at the villa, for German-based writers, visual artists, composers, and filmmakers.
Construction
Villa Aurora was part of a building project initiated by Arthur Weber and George Ley in cooperation with the Los Angeles Times, which reported routinely on the construction of this "demonstration house". Weber hired architect Mark Daniels and interior designer Rodney Benso. The house pipe organ was built by Santa Monica Artcraft.[1] The wood for the ceilings was brought in from Spain and the fountains came from Italy. When Villa Aurora was finished in 1928, it featured the latest technological inventions and novelties in domestic design such as an electric garage openers, a dishwasher, a fridge and a gas range. Due to the depression, it was not sold, and the developer Weber and his family were forced to move in themselves in 1931. Financial problems forced Weber to leave the house in 1939 and the property sat idle.
Villa Aurora in 2017
The Feuchtwangers
In 1941, Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta arrived in Los Angeles via New York and Mexico after having escaped from the South of France. Lion Feuchtwanger liked the solitude for his work and the decision to purchase the house came easily. Here, Feuchtwanger created his third library. Marta bought the used furniture and took care of the garden. While Lion used to buy books whenever there was money to spend, Marta bought plants and created a huge garden, which was over time diminished in size through landslides.
After Lion's death in 1958 the house was left to the University of Southern California with the stipulation that Marta would be allowed to stay for the remainder of her life and was made the caretaker of the library, which had grown to 30,000 volumes. At present the Villa is still home to 22,000 books, with the most valuable copies having been moved to the USC Feuchtwanger Memorial Library.[3]
Artists-in-residence
Marta Feuchtwanger lived at Villa Aurora until her death in 1987. After Marta's death the University of Southern California was looking to sell the property. The sale of the dilapidated Villa seemed imminent and USC professor Harold von Hofe asked the journalist and Feuchtwanger biographer Volker Skierka to launch an initiative to save the Villa Aurora. He also won the support of many public figures in politics and the media, such as the former head of the publishing house Rowohlt, Fritz J. Raddatz, and member of the German parliament, Freimut Duve. The goal was to create a "Villa Massimo on the Pacific" modeled after the artists residency Villa Massimo in Rome. In order to preserve the house as the only existing monument to European and German exiles to the West Coast of the United States, the association "Friends and Supporters of Villa Aurora" was founded in Berlin. The non-profit organization secured public funding from the German Federal Foreign Office, the Berlin Senate, the Berlin Lottery Foundation and the Tagesspiegel Foundation and was able to purchase and renovate the house. Frank Dimster, FAIA, restored the house and received the City of Los Angeles Historic Preservation Award in 1996.[4]
The Feuchtwanger House was landmarked as one of the Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monuments and also by the Pacific Palisades Historical Society. The historic organ that in addition to Marta Feuchtwanger, Bruno Walter, Ernst Toch and Hanns Eisler had played on, was restored in 2010. The historic furniture, including the beds of Marta and Lion, and their desks and chairs, are still on the premises.
Villa Aurora serves as an artists' retreat offering residency fellowships for German-based writers, visual artists, composers, and filmmakers.The villa is still owned by the Berlin-based non-profit, but is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.[5] In 2015, filmmaker Edward Berger was awarded a fellowship to spend six months at Villa Aurora.[6]
Together with the USC Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, the organization awards an annual Feuchtwanger Fellowship to artists who are persecuted in their home countries in memory of the history of German emigration in the 1930s.
Sponsors and private donations further help to maintain the historic property. The Villa stands as a reminder of German exile in the United States and is a memorial to German-Exile-Culture and the persecution of the German Jews. Villa Aurora is a place for cultural encounters, creative debates and joint projects. Since 1995 around 300 artists have enlivened this place and have themselves been inspired by U.S. culture and the exiles' traces.
The Villa Aurora Forum in Berlin organizes the meetings of the selection committees which choose the fellows of Villa Aurora. The Forum also presents the results of the artists' works to the German public through exhibitions, screenings, readings, concerts and the publishing of editions. At the annual 'Villa Aurora Nacht' in Berlin, the newly chosen fellows are presented along with the work of the ones from the previous year.
Berlin office
The Villa Aurora is operated by two institutions: the Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e.V., situated in Berlin, and the Friends of Villa Aurora Inc., in Los Angeles. In addition to administering the selection of grant recipients and the organization's overall funding, the Berlin Office produces programs and publications featuring alumni presenting results of their stays in Los Angeles to the German public.
The Berlin office also develops programs focused on current transatlantic debates as well as the history of exile. Regular events include both an annual reception, which brings future fellows and alumni together with representatives from culture, politics, media, the sciences and humanities, as well as the commemoration of the Burning of the Books on May 10, 1933.
The office is situated at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities on Gendarmenmarkt. Once a year, the organization arranges meetings of the juries responsible for selecting artists for the Villa Aurora Fellowships and intellectuals addressing fundamental issues of our time for the Thomas Mann Fellowships. As a result of intense discussion, experts choose recipients for the subsequent year from a large number of applicants. For those selected, the Berlin office is the first point of contact: It is where they outline their projects and plans and work with the Berlin team to initiate contacts with partners in Los Angeles.
Together with Reporters Without Borders and the University of Southern California's Feuchtwanger Memorial Library, Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House e.V. grants its annual Feuchtwanger Fellowship to a writer or journalist committed to human rights or facing censorship and persecution in their home countries. Additionally, the Berlin team, in cooperation with a partner institution, invites an artist from Los Angeles to Berlin to foster sustainable cultural exchange with Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House alumni.[7]
Checkpoint California
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Villa Aurora as an institution for cultural exchange in the US, the event Checkpoint California took place at the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle[de]. Between June 12 and 28, 2015, Villa Aurora Fellows (e.g. Dietrich Brüggemann, Stefan Kriekhaus, Uljana Wolf, Heinz Emigholz, Rosa von Praunheim, Steven Warwick, Veronika Kellndorfer, Steve Rowell, Felicitas Hoppe) presented their work, gave lectures and talked about their current projects. During the last day, moderator Jörg Heiser led a panel with future Villa Aurora fellow Susan Philipsz and former fellow Christian Jankowski. Checkpoint California ended with a performance by Matan Zamir, Nicola Mascia, Claudia De Serpa Soares and Jeff Wood.
Fellows
Past fellows of the artist-in-residence program include:[8]
Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized versions of German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer.
Richard Joseph Neutra was an Austrian-American architect. Living and building for most of his career in Southern California, he came to be considered a prominent and important modernist architect. His most notable works include the Kaufmann Desert House, in Palm Springs, California.
Pacific Palisades is a neighborhood in the Westside region of the city of Los Angeles, California, situated about 20 miles (32 km) west of downtown Los Angeles. From January 7-31, 2025, the majority of Pacific Palisades was severely affected and destroyed by the Palisades Fire, a part of the wider Southern California wildfires.
Lion Feuchtwanger was a German Jewish novelist and playwright. A prominent figure in the literary world of Weimar Germany, he influenced contemporaries including playwright Bertolt Brecht.
Salka Viertel was an Austrian actress and Hollywood screenwriter. 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). She also played opposite Garbo in MGM's German-language version of Anna Christie (1930). Viertel was known as the "social connector" within the large European émigré community of artists who settled on the West Side of Los Angeles in the 1930s and '40s.
Anthony Heilbut is an American writer, and a Grammy Award winning record producer of gospel music. He is noted for his biography of Thomas Mann, and is also a two-time recipient of the Grand Prix du Disque.
Alexander Stephan was a specialist in German literature and area studies. He was a professor, Ohio Eminent Scholar, and Senior Fellow of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University (OSU).
John Burgan FRSA is an independent documentary director and writer. Many of his films are themed around identity, sense of belonging, and migration.
Marc Sabat is a Canadian composer based in Berlin, Germany, since 1999.
German Exilliteratur is the name for works of German literature written in the German diaspora by refugee authors who fled from Nazi Germany, Nazi Austria, and the occupied territories between 1933 and 1945. These dissident writers, poets and artists, many of whom were of Jewish ancestry or held anti-Nazi beliefs, fled into exile in 1933 after the Nazi Party came to power in Germany and after Nazi Germany annexed Austria by the Anschluss in 1938, abolished the freedom of press, and started to prosecute authors and ban works.
Marta Feuchtwanger was the irrepressible and somewhat eccentric third child of a prosperous Munich businessman who in 1912 married the author Lion Feuchtwanger. Although they married only after Marta became pregnant with Feuchtwanger's child, the marriage lasted forty-six years and she became both a devoted wife and a huge influence on his work. The Jewish couple were forced to emigrate during the Hitler period. After her husband died in 1958 Marta Feuchtwanger spent nearly three decades as a high-profile widow in Los Angeles.
Robert Earl Langdon Jr. was an American architect based in Los Angeles, California. With Ernest C. Wilson Jr., he designed 27 office buildings along Wilshire Boulevard as well as the Getty Villa in the Pacific Palisades and the Bank of America Building in Beverly Hills. He was the President of the Pasadena chapter of the American Institute of Architects.
The Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, in the U.S. state of California is the former residence of Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann, who lived there with his family during his exile from 1942 until 1952. Designed by the architect Julius Ralph Davidson, the house at 1550 San Remo Drive was built in 1941/42. In 2016, it was acquired by the German federal government, and opened on June 18, 2018 as a place for transatlantic dialogue and debate.
The Salka and Berthold Viertel House at 165 North Mabery Road in Santa Monica, California, was the home of the Austrian screenwriter Salka Viertel and her husband Bertold from 1933 to 1944.
Jutta Allmendinger is a German sociologist who has been serving as professor of educational sociology and labor market research at Humboldt University since 2007. She was president of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center from 2007 to 2024.
Mark Roy Daniels was an architect, landscape architect, civil engineer, and city planner active in California. He was known for creating plans that incorporated existing natural features in order to preserve a sense of local character. He worked on master plans for the development of neighborhoods in San Francisco and the East Bay, on the Monterey Peninsula, in Los Angeles, and elsewhere. In the years immediately preceding the formation of the National Park System, he was briefly the general superintendent and landscape engineer for the entire system of national parks under the United States Department of the Interior.
Karin Apollonia Müller is a German contemporary photographer artist. She has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships. Her work is published, exhibited and is in the following collections: The Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art - New York, Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art among others.
Vajiko Chachkhiani is a Georgian artist whose work mostly involves film, sculpture, photography and visual installations. Currently he lives and works in Berlin, Germany and Tbilisi, Georgia. Chachkhiani's work has been shown at the Venice Biennale.
Eva Herrmann was a German-American painter, illustrator, draftsperson, and caricaturist.
Marta Feuchtwanger. An Emigre Life: Munich, Berlin, Sanary, Pacific Palisades. Interviewed by Lawrence M. Weschler. University of California, Los Angeles 1976.
Marta Feuchtwanger. Only a Woman, Years Days Hours. Aufbau Verlag Berlin Leipzig, 1984.
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