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Pallenberg’s own words are read by Scarlett Johansson, albeit — perhaps to avoid undue scrutiny — without Pallenberg’s Mitteleuropa accent.

Before long, Schine’s story opened out onto an often-overlooked history: the World War II era when refugee artists including Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg made Los Angeles a kind of Mitteleuropa in exile.

Rather, they were the memories of what the women of the camp had made before the war, foods richly evocative of Jewish Mitteleuropa: stuffed eggs, stews and all manner of dumplings.

It’s celebrating its first 20 years with a showcase of its surviving founder’s own collection: not only jewels of modern Mitteleuropa, but ancient sculpture, medieval broadswords and reliquaries, and gleaming oddities from Renaissance cabinets of curiosities.

“I really don’t want to get into the sepia saga business,” he added, “writing up some elegiac Mitteleuropa narrative of loss.”