We all seek it in one form or another, at different times, in different ways. Maybe it’s just my projection, but these times seem to be all about the layers of sanctuary. Each of us trying to find his own in his own way. Maybe it’s true at any time in history, but today stands out, if only by way of degree and frequency.
I find solace (safety, peace) in mostly quiet places. But I also find it in convictions confirmed; that is, knowledge I know to be true and unwavering. I find it in friendship, beauty, animals, and in nature. From there it comes in a constantly shifting but descending order: music, books, childhood memories, romance, superb humor, good (vegan) food, good wine, working out, an occasional “bud” from the ganja god. and in places and times captured in movies.
First, let’s distinguish some terms. The term sanctuary is most often seen as a “place” of safety, protection, or shelter. Whereas refuge most commonly refers to a “state” or “condition” of safety, protection, or shelter. Nitpicking academics say the terms are different, but then they admit that a refuge can in fact also be a “place.” – Hence, the bottom line: one is the other’s synonym after all, and who gives a damn one way or the other?
Films about the past have topped my list lately for places of sanctuary. Topping the list of course should be no surprise: Ricks’ Cafe Americana in the film Casablanca. It’s the perfect ambiance which stirs up a wonderful alchemy, one that becomes airborne with tobacco smoke and jasmine. The chemistry draws in exotic figures who then fuel more ambiance. It’s a warm swirling convection that keeps churning until the predawn. And, then, everyone either retires to their Tiffany boudoirs, or they go out for coffee, still driven by conversation. – In Denver years ago, I knew “nocturnal” souls who normal working people would never see, not until midnight, if lucky. I just called them the “night people.”
One of them lived down the hall in my apartment building. In my mind she was the winner of the Madame Morticia lookalike contest, painted in black every night, always behind dark sunglasses, anorexically thin, long and straight jet-black hair to match her Morticia wardrobe. The smell of cigarettes filled the hall just by opening her door. Here was a wonderfully, refreshingly, dysfunctionally, semi-crazy creature of the night obsessed with what absolutely needed sharing with fellow conspirators somewhere in the depths of LoDo. She was driven, and I envied her idee fixe – almost.
Most people think Rick’s Cafe was pure fabrication. It was not. It leaped out of the active imagination of its director, Michael Curtiz, alias Mihaly Kaminer by birth – Americanized in New York. As a director and writer he brought with him memories of the real cafe he left behind in Budapest, called The New York strangely enough. It’s ironic how sanctuary for Europeans becomes America; for Americans, Europe. Curtiz was part of a fraternity of bright Hungarian Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s Reich. Another was Arthur Koestler, whose own life could have passed as a real-life antecedent to Rick Blaine (Bogart’s alter ego).
On the occasion in March [1940], when the police searched my flat, they took away nearly all my files and manuscripts, but the typescript of Darkness at Noon escaped their attention. The top copy was lying on my desk, where I kept it on the theory of Edgar Allan Poe that conspicuous objects were least likely to attract suspicion; while on an opposite theory the carbon copy was hidden on the top of the bookshelf. In the end, I was again arrested and the original German version of the book was lost. But by that time the English translation had been completed.
Ten days prior to the Germans reaching Paris on June 14th, Koestler’s life began to read like a Hollywood script.1 While writing and finishing Darkness at Noon, he fled trying to find safety wherever he could. First to Lisbon for two months where he failed to obtain a visa from the British consulate. Afraid of getting caught, he borrowed suicide pills from Walter Benjamin (who did commit suicide at the Spanish border). The British consulate at least helped him gain passage to New York, but instead he decided to stay in Portugal, preferring to risk uncertainty than be exiled in America. Here was a man who had to live on the edge. This whole ordeal of course he turned into another book, Arrival and Departure.
With Koestler we begin to explore the real depths of sanctuary. Darkness at Noon drew from Koestler’s early experiences. The book’s protagonist mirrors his struggle to flee Nazi oppression and the moral dilemmas following from that, what he called “Kafkaesque events.” Though specific names aren’t mentioned (it refers only to generic names), it’s set in the USSR during the 1938 Purges. The main character gains depth from Koestler’s experience of being imprisoned by Franco during the Spanish Civil War (caught impersonating a Franco sympathizer while working for the Comintern), kept in solitary confinement and “expecting” to be shot. The book is divided into four “hearings” (interrogations).
Koestler’s story mirrors the stories of his confederates, all fleeing imminent danger at the same time. Together, we get scripts leading to Casablanca, Darkness at Noon, an almost endless list. In his book Artists in Exile, Joseph Horowitz wrote: “As a group, they were the intellectual immigrants most prone to sudden obscurity… where some found sinecures as ostensible screenwriters. They also proved exceptionally prone to return to Europe once World War II ended.”
From Germany alone: Bertolt Brecht, Herman Broch, Alfred Doblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Heinrich Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, and Franz Werfel. Visual artists and architects: Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Laszlo MoholyNagy, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Painters: Max Beckman and Hans Hofmann. Sculptor: Jacques Lipschitz. Cartoonist: Saul Steinberg, photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. Immigrant actors and filmmakers: Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Great Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and on and on. Again, the list is almost endless.
It’s no surprise that Hollywood’s general depiction of sanctuary hailed from those most needing it. European Jews fleeing Europe, even before Hitler. I wrote about this some time ago, in a piece titled The Great American Story (9/30/21). Arriving in California and seeking permanent asylum, they knew their “subject matter” firsthand. That is, they found themselves in a “young” nation still without a national mythology. It desperately needed one, and working citizens needed a place to go to “escape” the hardships of the street, and then later the Great Depression. All they had was the movie theater. Hence, they set to do invent a new American story. If successful, it would also cement the opportunity to stay in America. “Change your name, get rid of the accent,” and become as Anglo-Protestant looking as possible. Asylum was sanctuary.
The “sanctuary” narrative became America’s narrative. From Lady Liberty’s “Give me your huddled masses” through Ellis Island, the national myth was one of refuge for refugees. We were all refugees in one way or another. – Immigrant Jews, most of whom didn’t know anything about American history, who could barely speak English, but who knew how to market ideas, authored the great American myth through images, movie scripts, fashion, literature, and the media. The motif was all about the pioneer spirit, the rugged seeker of freedom, the Hollywood cowboy, the self-made entrepreneur, and “rugged individualism.” – Americans ate it up like candy, and John Wayne (believe it or not) owed his career to immigrant Jews. It may have been whole cloth, but it didn’t matter.
My generation was born into that American storyline, and we basically know nothing else. In other words, we were indoctrinated at birth. But, now that we’re old, we also have our own ideas about what sanctuary means, especially if it’s the kind that repels “indoctrination.” For myself, it rests in the deepest recesses of the mind, corners no one can find.
Interestingly, my favorite characters fit a visual stereotype of the exhausted and haggard emigre artist (writer, painter, philosopher, psychologist) freshly arriving from out in the cold. His only protection is a Bogart-trench coat and fedora. He needs a smoke and hot java. He has a story to tell, information vital to us all. He’s as alert and anxious as Morticia scurrying into LoDo. He points us to a cafe across the street where coffee waits for us in a naugahyde booth (a la Tom Waits).
Impressions of Peter Lorre eluding police inside the Cafe Americana fill my mind. The anti-hero no one knows or thanks, perhaps because of his slippery ways. But one has to thank him for what he’s done to the Gestapo couriers. Bogie remarks (in the script), “Maybe I am impressed with you after all.” Versions of us all emerge from the cast of characters – Bogart’s “Rick Blaine,” Claude Rains’ “Louis Renault,” Conrad Veidt’s “Major Strasser,” Paul Heinreid’s “Victor Laszlo,” Ingrid Bergman’s “Ilsa Lund,” and Peter Lorre’s “Ugarte” – like archetypes. We are all of them.
The message which carries from the lips of our newly arrival, cold, wet, shivering, huddled over a candle at the bar, is to “keep silent.” Be invisible, inconspicuous, nonpartisan, myopic, and dull, if you are to survive in this world. It was the same message in the 1930s. The “SS” has never gone away. It has simply changed form and appearance under the guise of democracy and the American Way.
And there’s the rub. It was the conundrum that came crashing down on Europe’s exiles in the 1930s. How much can one stay quiet and still consider himself a breathing individual, with a conscience? What is to be ignored and dismissed, and what simply cannot be ignored and must be said? Another irony: Those most predisposed to “silence” are those who, when pushed enough, make the most noise of all. They are, after all, artists. Even those artists who write “for the drawer,” who paint/sculpt only for themselves, tap into creative spaces that evoke nothing but trouble. Trouble because they conflict with everything they’ve been told. Then the question is, to what extent does he share what he knows? How much, and with whom?
The character of “Carl” in Casablanca, played by S.Z. Sakall, comes to mind – another Hungarian Jew seeking refuge when Hungary joined the Axis powers. His sisters, niece, wife’s brother and sister were all killed in concentration camps. He recalled, “My childhood friend, Mike Cortiz, stood on top of a two-story high director’s rostrum and gave his orders through a megaphone. He was talking in German.” It was for the film Sodom and Gomorrah which launched Cortiz’ career. Cortiz, by the way, filled Rick’s Cafe with real European refugees, like Sakall, who crowded the dining room. Even the more humorous scenes were fraught with tension from actors who’s memories were very recent.
The last refuge of all, which some say is outer space (others say the deepest parts of the oceans), is really that of the mind. And even that isn’t safe, since our surveillance friends are busy learning how to “harness” even it. To date, though they can control what we know, they can’t yet control what we think (outside of the media). We still have the capacity to think freely if we “put our minds to it.”
It’s no mystery that certain elements exist to steer us along certain paths of awareness and understanding. That’s old news. The “public relations” industry (euphemism for “propaganda industry”) starting during World War I, found itself to be highly effective in controlling the public mood, especially regarding one’s enemies, about the government, the national religion (Christianity), our notions of democracy, justice, liberty, and so on.
In that context we each need to do what the medieval king did when his villagers were going mad from a poisoned well. He gathered his closest lieutenant and said “We too will drink from the well to show our allegiance to the people. But you and I will paint crosses on our foreheads to remind us that we know we are mad.” Sanctuary is all about knowing we are mad while living in the throes of madness. As a friend once said, “in an insane asylum run by the inmates.”
One may see sanctuary as a form of running, an expression of paranoia, etc. But there comes a point when one sees the difference between running and preserving, fearing unknowns and protecting what one does know. It’s a contrast amplified between the characters of Captain Louis Renault and Rick Blaine.
To demand a photomontage of this political (existential) atmosphere isn’t to be found in Hollywood or a bookstore. The best (and only) are “street photographers.” The best that ever were (in my view) have been deceased for some time, but they captured the essence of sanctuary not found. Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), Diane Arbus (1923-71), and Vivian Dorothy Maier (1926-2009). Lange of course captured people caught in the Great Depression, Japanese-American internment camps, sharecroppers, and rural poverty. Maier captured mostly street scenes, while Arbus captured strippers, carnival workers, dwarfs, nudists, children, mothers, couples, and old people – unexpected, unprepared, unrehearsed, invisible, “unimportant,” with nothing to say (yet so much to say). These were shots of “the street,” people caught unaware, naked and exposed, who, at one level, didn’t care about facades and lies. They were just surviving. — This was America, the blood and marrow of a nation, believing somehow that America was still about safety and sanctuary.
It’s the face of everyone all at once, vignettes on the cellar wall (of my imagination), sometimes photographed, sometimes painted, cropped, sometimes painfully real, sometimes distorted, abstract, surreal, superimposed. They are not the images people in the “real” world, airbrushed and painted. These are the “night people.”
What Curtiz did was paint a portrait of real people all gathered in one dining room. Everyone is elegantly dressed and pretending to be having a good time. But, as mentioned, they were real life refugees wearing the faces of shock and disillusionment – essentially the same faces photographed by Lange, Arbus, and Maier.
In that sense, the denizens of my sanctum sanctorum are those most traumatized, disillusioned, confused, alienated, and self-exiled, but also stubbornly creative. They survive only by the grace of insight and artistry – both which carve out a place to go when life gets disingenuous, saccharin and toxic. It’s the only place left where crosses stay painted on foreheads.
© 2023 Richard Hiatt
1Koestler’s life was indeed a story worthy of Hollywood. Consider, his mother a patient of Sigmund Freud’s, a member of the Zionist movement, becoming a Communist, friend of Langston Hughes, reporter on the Spanish Civil War where he’s imprisoned and nearly executed,, friend of W.H. Auden, fell in with the Comintern (student of Marx), friend of Bertolt Brecht, flees France, befriends Walter Benjamin (also fleeing), meets Thomas Mann, gets drunk with Dylan Thomas, meets George Orwell, flirts with Mary McCarthy, is imprisoned in a French detention camp after the war but freed again by friends like Noel Coward, starts the “Congress for Cultural Freedom” in the 1950s, takes LSD with Tim Leary, and lectures at colleges. Throughout his career he publishes numerous novels and essays. Married three times, multiple awards and an honorary doctorate. In 1976 he’s diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. In 1983, he and his wife commit suicide together (taken in part from an interview given by journalist and historian Anne Applebaum). – If anyone knew the importance of “sanctuary,” it was Koestler.
The Subversive Imagination: Dispatches from the American Frontier 