Stranieri in paradiso / Lost in Paradise. Viaggio nelle case degli artisti europei espatriati a Los Angeles durante il nazismo / A Journey through the Los Angeles Homes of European Expatriates during the Nazi Years ; premessa di=foreword by Vita Fortunati

From the rise of Nazism to the Second World War, Los Angeles played host to a number of European artists fleeing Hitler: Bertold Brecht and Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg and Theodor Adorno, Marlene Dietrich and Billy Wilder are just a few of the celebrated names which grew to comprise an expatriate community of notable excellence. In their private writings, as in their most well-known works, these characters demonstrate both gratitude for the country which hosts them, as well as nostalgia for their distant homeland, sentiments which leave them feeling like strangers or “exiled in paradise,” according to the emblematic definition of Brecht. This volume – illustrated by many photographs by Federico Zignani - retraces the streets of Los Angeles in search of the homes of these expatriates, in order to reconstruct a map of the places which became, in time, junctions between Old Europe and New America. There follows a fascinating photographic and narrative journey that offers, at one time, these residences as home-refuges and home-exiles: the memory of the motherland carried those who lived there to attempt to reconstruct a familiar condition, of community lost; life, in these houses, developed into meeting centers, new town squares in which to gather and speak, remembering the past, living the present and planning the future.