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For some the new context of exile provided a degree of artistic stimulus. In London, Kokoschka got to know--largely through his Marxist friend the refugee German art historian Francis Klingender--the tradition of English caricature, the mordant images of Hogarth and Gillray; they are reflected in such paintings as Anschluss--Alice in Wonderland, 1942, with its trio of figures, the appeaser Neville Chamberlain, a German soldier and an Austrian Catholic bishop, imitating the Chinese monkeys that see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. And the ever alert Salvador Dali managed to include a number of proto-Pop American images in his pictures when working in the U.S. Painted just after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his Melancholy Atomic and Uranic Idyll, 1945, has a bomber in it as well as the first Yank baseball player to turn up in a Surrealist picture.
The exiles most deeply affected by American culture were not painters at all but writers, musicians and directors, from Bertolt Brecht to Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Lubitsch and Thomas Mann, who gravitated to Los Angeles, worked fitfully but sometimes successfully for the movies and for a while between the Anschluss and the McCarthy years made that palmy city into an extension of the Berlin, the Vienna they had lost. "It is wonderful here on the Pacific, and life is a thousand times better here than in New York," wrote the great director Max Reinhardt to his son. "But I grew up on the fourth balcony of the Burgtheater..."
That was the problem: so often, the natives didn't know who these people really were, or treat them with the deference they felt they had earned. In one of the excellent catalog essays for "Exiles and Emigres," the writer Lawrence Weschler compares their idea of themselves to "Roman nobility in the rustic provinces...as stubbornly patronizing and aloof as the locals were sometimes naive and gauche." The dachshund story sums them up--as it does the situation of most exiles in America in the late 1930s and '40s. Two dachshunds meet on the palisade in Santa Monica, California, and schmooze about their fortunes. "Here, it's true, I'm a dachshund," says one to the other. "But in the old country I was a Saint Bernard!"