functioning brakes was my companion and saw with me the timid smile of the angel of Paul Klee and Walter Benjamin's story in the face of man-made progress and the piled-up ruins of its disasters.

In 2013, parallel to my Angelus Novus cycle, I composed the Seven Songs for SUNRISE on Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's groundbreaking Hollywood silent film classic Aurora / Sunrise. Song of two humans, which was the first film ever to win three Oscars in 1927. A few years earlier, I wrote the orchestral GOYA cycle, also in connection with Lion Feuchtwanger's novel of the same name. I received the Arnold Schönberg Prize for the GOYA II memoratorium, which was premiered in the Berlin Philharmonie by the Deutsches Symphonieorchester under Ingo Metzmacher and the Rundfunkchor Berlin. Like Feuchtwanger, Schönberg found exile in LA, where I met his son Ronald and his wife Barbara, daughter of the Viennese exile composer Erich Zeisl, in January. And a little later the music critic and composer Walter Arlen, to whom I dedicated AURORA (from: Nachtschatten) for his 100th birthday. Like Walter Arlen, the theremin also turned 100 this year; its inventor, Lew Termen, called himself Leon Theremin as a Russian in LA. His invention - the only electronic instrument that can be played without touching it and produces sounds through arm and hand movements - seems magical with its fragile, ghostly songs. But it actually sounds like a SCREAM deep on the rocky Pacific floor.
In 1989, I wrote my very first orchestral work with the palindrome title KOMA on and about the so-called German reunification period: a long-term musical photograph of social and human upheavals. Composed before the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Berlin, where I had not been able to study as a multiple conscientious objector, it was premiered in West Berlin in 1990. I received my first composition prize for it, named after Hanns Eisler, who had played the organ in exile at the Villa Aurora. Eisler had been a teacher of my master teacher Georg Katzer at the Berlin Academy of Arts. Katzer in turn composed the oratorical scenes Medea in Corinth to a libretto by Christa Wolf. A few years earlier, she had written her novel Stadt der Engel (City of Angels) about the fall of the Berlin Wall in the Villa Aurora.
Whether I was composing in the Lion Feuchtwanger or Franz Werfel Room or in the so-called garage, I always had Topanga Canyon behind me and the Pacific Ocean with the four offshore islands in front of me. This was the land and sea of the Tongva. They were the first to colonize the entire Los Angeles Basin, an area of around 4000 square miles, reclaiming it and creating their magical places. These native americans experienced the same sunrises as the countless people they call homeless people here today. And like me, from January to March 2020 with a view from Villa Aurora in the hills of Pacific Palisades on the edge of the Topanga. This sunny paradise is now itself a fragile "homeless dance floor", just like the mostly concreted-over, built-up magical places of the indigenous people. In this place, the poorest as well as the richest are in exile.
Almost every day of my stay at Villa Aurora, I saw the green EXIT sign covered in white tape in the salon of the villa. Three small strips of tape transformed the word into EXIL.
AURORA (from: Nachtschatten) is a work about farewells, displacement, exile. About the resulting LOSHEIT. About fatherland, mother tongue. The erasure. Tearing out. Erasing. It is about the magical places of the Tongva and of East and West Berlin, about German history and destinies. About what it is like to write historical novels in German, persecuted and homeless in exile in a huge villa in a foreign country with a different language. Or, like Schönberg, composing the Survivor of Warsaw and finding a spiritual EXIT from the shadows of this sunny place.
In February of my stay at Villa Aurora, I worked on two poetic audio-video documentaries about the serious riots and uprisings in the L.A. neighborhoods of Watts (1965) and South Central (1992). It was only after my return to Germany, when I completed these audiovisual works as well as AURORA (from: Nachtschatten) in my workhouse in Märkische Schweiz - five minutes by bike from Bertolt Brecht's last place of residence and work after his return from exile in L.A. - that the nationwide I can't breathe and Black Lives Matter protests ignited. Again. Figures crawled out of the night shadows, out of the cracks, holes, fissures in the stone plaster and half-timbering of Villa Aurora and told me about all this and more during my nights. Goya's spirits and those of the Tongva. The native people firmly believed that everything in the world is filled with life, the bushes, the rocks, the sun, the water, ourselves and also our places. They believed in the ideas that flow into all living things and in the messages that radiate back. They had the knowledge of these existential connections. AURORA (from: Nachtschatten) - sound images of basic conflicts and loyalties, songs of the human factor and the basic questions of human coexistence. Light and shadow of the rising and setting sun in this non-place.Helmut Oehring, Oktober 2020