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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.
During the war the Villa became a meeting place for fellow émigrés, just as Salka and Berthold Viertel's house in Santa Monica. Prominent members of the German emigre community who would meet at the houses included Thomas Mann and Heinrich Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, Vicki Baum, Bruno Frank, Ludwig Marcuse, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht, as well as other European expatriates like Charlie Chaplin and Charles Laughton.
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.
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. In 2015, filmmaker Edward Berger was awarded a fellowship to spend six months at Villa Aurora.
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.
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.
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