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Villa Aurora is the former home of the German-Jewish author Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta. The Feuchtwangers bought this Spanish-style mansion in 1943 for only $9,000, the annual salary of a school teacher. 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: Der Tag wird kommen, Waffen für Amerika, Die Jüdin von Toledo, Narrenweisheit oder Tod und Verklärung des Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jefta und seine Töchter and Goya oder der arge Weg der Erkenntnis. Villa Aurora is located in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles and has been used as an artists residence since 1995. 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.〔http://www.villa-aurora.org/en/organ.html〕 Villa Aurora was inspired by the Teruel Cathedral outside Sevilla, Spain. The wood for the ceilings was brought in from Spain and the fountains came from Italy. The Malibu Tile Company supplied the decorative tiles throughout the entire house. 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 frisge 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 and 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. Despite the fact that the Villa was in deplorable condition (with windows broken, the cellar full of debris, the garden overgrown) they bought the house in 1943 for the price of $ 9,000, which at the time equalled the annual salary of a High School teacher. They appreciated the location all the more as the landscape of Pacific Palisades reminded them of the Mediterranian where they had travelled extensively during the early days of their marriage. With gasoline rationing in effect, travel between Pacific Palisades and Los Angeles was difficult, making purchase of outlying real estate unappealing for most. But Lion Feuchtwanger liked this solitude for his work, and the decision to purchase the house came easily. Here, Feuchtwanger created his third library. Marta bought the furniture as second hand and she 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 dimished in size through some landslides. The Feuchtwanger house became a meeting place of fellow émigrés such as Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg, Vicki Baum, Bruno Frank, Ludwig Marcuse, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht as well as the Feuchtwangers’ American friends like Charlie Chaplin and Charles Laughton. Thomas Mann called Villa Aurora a “true castle by the sea”. After Lions 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. Today, the Villa still houses 22,000 books, whereas the most valuable copies moved to the USC Feuchtwanger Memorial Library.〔http://www.villa-aurora.org/en/history.html〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Villa Aurora」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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