Speakers and Programming

Times are subject to change.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2025

12:00pm | German Émigré Art and Culture in 1930s and 1940s Los Angeles

Benno Herz | Program Director, Thomas Mann House

 
In the 1930s and 1940s, Los Angeles became a vibrant cultural center for a distinguished group of German-speaking artists and intellectuals, including literary authors, poets, and playwrights, such as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Vicki Baum, Bertolt Brecht, and Lion Feuchtwanger, philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, filmmakers and actors like Fritz Lang, Lilian Harvey, and Joe May, and composers Arnold Schoenberg and Alma Mahler-Werfel, who had all fled Nazi Germany. Many European artists and intellectuals made Los Angeles their new home and left a lasting cultural imprint on this city. They were often in conversation with U.S. friends and supporters, as well as other fellow emigrants who already came to Los Angeles in the 1920s, such as the architects Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler. This presentation explores German-speaking émigré art and culture in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s and how this history continues to influence the city today, from film, literature, and philosophy, to California modernist architecture and political debates of the time.
 

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2025

12:00pm | Postcards Saved Me: How Ephemera Has Helped Guide My Writing of Fiction and Nonfiction

Naomi Hirahara | Social historian and author

As former Rafu Shimpo journalist Naomi Hirahara has produced more historical nonfiction and period mysteries during this stage of her writing career, she has increasingly discovered that ephemera like postcards have been invaluable in directing storylines and imagining life in the early and mid-20th centuries. She will show how certain ephemera helped to breathe life into books like Terminal Island: Lost Communities on America's Edge and also her Japantown mysteries, including her upcoming Crown City (February 2026), which takes place in 1903 Pasadena.

2:00pm | From Ararat to Yurumein: Stories of immigration as found in the unique museums of greater Los Angeles

Todd Lerew | Director of Special Projects, Library Foundation of Los Angeles


There are more than 750 museums throughout the greater Los Angeles region. Many of these preserve and interpret stories of diasporic communities and individual immigrants from around the world, from the Garifuna Museum in South LA, to the Armenian collections of the Ararat-Eskijian Museum in the San Fernando Valley, to the haunting artwork of prominent Holocaust survivor Mel Mermelstein in Orange County, and the gallery at the Taiwanese Buddhist Hsi Lai Temple (which translates to "coming to the West") in Hacienda Heights. Join Todd Lerew, author of the new book, Also On View: Unique and Unexpected Museums of Greater Los Angeles (Angel City Press, 2024), for this illustrated talk that veers off the beaten path, exploring the incredible diversity that is represented in our local museum-scape.