One of the source texts of exile research in the 20th century: "Salkaherz" - a genius of friendship in Californian exile. The names of the friends whom Salomea Steuermann, known to everyone as Salka Viertel, managed to gather read like an artist's lexicon from the first half of the last century: Karl Kraus and Alfred Polgar, Max Reinhardt, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Albert Einstein and Arnold Schönberg, Sergei Eisenstein and Greta Garbo, for whom she was the screenwriter, Bertolt Brecht and Bruno Frank, Hanns Eisler - and many other artists, with and without names.

This fascinating and early emancipated Salka Viertel was not a Hollywood film star or a fashionable society lady, but a gifted hostess who turned her home on Mabery Road in Santa Monica into a highly praised salon - ultimately becoming a "harbor for the homeless," the European emigrants after 1933. Salka Viertel's memoirs, published in the United States in the late 1960s, are the memoirs of someone almost forgotten, offering an unparalleled perspective on dramatic decades of European cultural history - especially on the world of theater and film up to 1933 and the exile of this culture in California.