Erika Mann

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Erika Mann (around 1938)

Erika Julia Hedwig Mann (born November 9, 1905 in Munich ; † August 27, 1969 in Zurich ) was a German actress , cabaret artist , writer and editor . She founded the political cabaret Die Pfeffermühle in 1933 and worked with lectures - as a writer and journalist even after her emigration to the United States  - against National Socialism . In addition to her work as the administrator of the estate of her father Thomas and her brother Klaus Mann , she has left behind an extensive body of political essays, reports, travelogues and children's books.

Life

The Mann family with Golo as a baby in front of the summer house in Bad Tölz 1909; Klaus and Erika Mann are sitting on the bottom left of the stairs.

family

Erika Mann was the first-born daughter of the writer and later Nobel Prize winner for literature Thomas Mann and his wife Katia , née Pringsheim , daughter of a German intellectual family of Jewish descent. It was named after Katia Mann's brother Erik, who died early, Thomas Mann's sister Julia Mann and her great-grandmother Hedwig Dohm and, like her mother, was baptized Protestant.

Thomas Mann (1937, photo by Carl Van Vechten )

In a letter to his brother Heinrich Mann , Thomas Mann expressed his disappointment about the birth of the first child:

“So it's a girl; a disappointment for me, as I will admit among ourselves, for I had very much wished for a son and do not cease to do it. [...] I perceive a son as more poetic, more than a continuation and a restart of myself under new conditions. "

Later, however, he frankly admitted in his diary that he " preferred three of the sixes, the two elders [Erika and Klaus] and Elisabethchen , with a strange decisiveness".

He had a special relationship of trust with Erika, which was later shown in the fact that she exerted a direct influence on the important decisions of her father. The siblings were also aware of their special role, as their brother Golo remembers : "Eri has to add salt to the soup." This saying about the twelve-year-old from 1917 became an often used phrase in the Mann family.

After Erika followed her brother Klaus, with whom she was closely connected throughout her life - they appeared “like twins”, and Klaus Mann described their togetherness with the words “our solidarity was absolute and without reservation”. The four younger siblings were Golo, Monika , Elisabeth and Michael . The children grew up in Munich. Her family on the mother's side belonged to the influential upper middle class of the city, the father came from the Lübeck merchant family Mann and had already successfully published the novel Buddenbrooks in 1901 .

School time and first experiences in theater

The backdrop of the Mann-Villa Poschi , a replica on the Bavaria film site in Munich

In 1914 the Mann family moved into their well-known villa at Poschingerstraße 1 in Bogenhausen , which was called in the Poschi family . From 1912 to 1914 Erika Mann and her brother Klaus attended the private Ebermayerschule , then the Bogenhausen elementary school for a year, and from 1915 to 1920 she attended the girls' school on St. Annaplatz. In May 1921 she switched to the Luisengymnasium in Munich . Together with her brother Klaus Mann and befriended neighbors' children, including daughters Bruno Walters , Gretel and Lotte, as well as Ricki Hallgarten , son of a Jewish intellectual family, she founded an ambitious acting troupe in 1919, the lay association of German mimics . While still a student at the Luisengymnasium in Munich, she stood on the stage of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin for the first time after an engagement by Max Reinhardt . The sometimes malicious pranks that she used in the so-called "Herzogpark gang" with Klaus and befriended neighbors' children induced her and her brother Klaus to teach at a boarding school for reform education , the Hochwaldhausen mountain school in the high Vogelsberg in Upper Hesse . This intermezzo lasted from April to July 1922; then Erika Mann returned to the Luisengymnasium. In 1924 she passed her Abitur, albeit with bad grades, and began studying acting in Berlin, which she broke off because of numerous stage engagements in Hamburg , Munich and Berlin, among others .

Actress and writer

In 1925, Erika Mann portrayed a lesbian couple with Pamela Wedekind in her brother Klaus, Anja and Esther's first publicly staged play . The play, directed and assisted by Gustaf Gründgens , was performed at the Hamburger Kammerspiele . Klaus Mann was engaged to Pamela Wedekind at the time and Erika Mann not only in love with her in the role. The appearance of the so-called “poet children” of the famous Thomas Mann made the play a great success with the public, but it was panned by the critics in terms of content and drama and the portrayal of same-sex love was viewed as a scandal.

Gustaf Gründgens as Hamlet (1936)

On July 24, 1926, she married the director and fellow actor Gustaf Gründgens, but they divorced on January 9, 1929. In 1927 she played in Klaus Mann's play Revue zu Vieren at the Leipziger Schauspielhaus again under the direction of Gustaf Gründgens and with the same cast as Anja and Esther and then went on tour with Klaus and Pamela Wedekind. Also Revue to fours got bad reviews. As a result, Gründgens, like Pamela Wedekind, refused to appear or direct any further performances of the play. Pamela Wedekind broke her engagement to Klaus Mann in 1928 and married Carl Sternheim in April 1930 , the father of the mutual friend of Erika and Klaus Mann, Dorothea Sternheim , called "Mopsa", who had designed the set and costumes for Revue zu Vieren .

Erika and Klaus Mann 1927. Photo by Eduard Wasow

In a kind of escape, Erika and Klaus Mann set out from Rotterdam on October 7, 1927, on a world tour lasting several months until July 1928, both of which led around the globe via the USA, Japan , Korea , China and the Soviet Union . Through her international acquaintances and the fame of her father, she got to know many celebrities from the American cultural scene, such as Emil Jannings , Greta Garbo and Upton Sinclair . With the name The Literary Mann Twins , the siblings presented themselves as twins in order to attract further attention. One focus of her trip was Hollywood , but her hope of being discovered there as a future film star or screenwriter was not fulfilled. They tried to finance their living through lectures, but the income was too low; and after the trip they had large debts, which Thomas Mann paid after receiving the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature .

Klaus Mann suggested to his sister that he should also write, which Erika initially refused. In his second autobiography, The Turning Point , he echoed Erika's opinion: "There are already enough writers in the family, she stubbornly maintained, and she is an Actrice by profession." the joint report on the trip under the title All around. The adventure of a trip around the world , which was published by S. Fischer Verlag , is reflected. After the trip, she did not return to her husband Gustaf Gründgens. Like her brother Klaus Mann, she no longer chose her own permanent place of residence, but lived in hotels or found shelter with her parents. She also put down her travel experiences in her first play Hotels , which was written in 1929 and is considered lost.

In the summer of 1930 Erika and Klaus Mann went on a trip to North Africa. In the city of Fez in Morocco, both of them first came into contact with the “magic herb hashish” through their guide. It was to become a “horror trip” for the siblings, which Klaus Mann later described in detail in his second autobiography, The Turning Point .

At the beginning of the 1930s, after changing engagements at various stages - in 1929 she played Queen Elisabeth in Schiller's Don Carlos in Munich - Erika Mann got her  first small film roles in girls in uniform as Miss von Attems and in Peter Voss, the millionaire . In 1931 the enthusiastic driver won a 10,000 kilometer rally across Europe together with her childhood friend Ricki Hallgarten. She wrote the comedy Plagiarism with the participation of Klaus Mann and wrote The Book of the Riviera. What is not in the Baedeker is shared with her brother. In the journalistic field Erika Mann made her debut with small articles and glosses for the Berlin magazine Tempo . In 1932 her first children's book, Stoffel flieg über Meer , was published, with illustrations by Ricki Hallgarten; and her Christmas play Jan's Wunderhündchen , written together with Hallgarten . A children's play in seven pictures was premiered in Darmstadt. Ricki Hallgarten did not live to see the Stoffel appear; he committed suicide on May 5, 1932. Erika Mann's efforts to dissuade her boyfriend from his suicide were unsuccessful.

Erika Mann earned her living with her film and theater roles as well as with literary works regardless of the critical global political situation due to the global economic crisis in 1929. If the money was not enough, she, like her brother Klaus, received the necessary financial support from her parents . But the rise of National Socialism in Germany ended Erika Mann's carefree, apolitical and adventurous life; For the first time she showed political commitment, which she also expressed in numerous newspaper articles. In January 1932 she appeared as a reciter at a pacifist women's assembly led by Constanze Hallgarten - mother of her friend Ricki - which was disrupted by right-wing groups. Through her appearance, she - like her family - got caught in the crossfire of the National Socialist press. Hallgarten and Mann successfully brought insults against two of the papers, the editors of which were fined 1500 Reichsmarks. But this was only an initial success, because her confrontation with the National Socialists meant the end of her career at the theater. At that time she was already addicted to alcohol and drugs, which made regular withdrawal and recovery cures necessary in the following years.

Cabaret artist in exile in Switzerland

Therese Giehse, photographed by Annemarie Schwarzenbach , 1933

Together with Klaus and her friend and lover Therese Giehse as well as the pianist and composer Magnus Henning and a few other friends, she founded the political-literary cabaret Die Pfeffermühle in the Bonbonniere in Munich on January 1, 1933 . The cabaret debuted with texts by Erika and Klaus Mann as well as Walter Mehring , the performances were sold out. The follow-up program premiered on February 1, 1933, but was already the finale in Germany, because after the Reichstag fire in Berlin in February, the National Socialists came to power in Bavaria at the beginning of March . In Munich, the National Socialist Franz von Epp ruled as Reich Commissioner for Bavaria.

Erika Mann, photographed by Annemarie Schwarzenbach, 1933

The ensemble members had to go into hiding to avoid arrest. Erika and Klaus Mann warned their parents, who were on a recreational trip to Arosa in March 1933 , by letter and by telephone against returning to Germany. Klaus Mann went to Paris on March 13, while Erika gathered up her father's Joseph manuscripts and left for Switzerland , where she gave Thomas Mann the manuscripts that had been saved from her parents' home in Munich.

The Mann family chose Sanary-sur-Mer in France as an exile in June 1933 , and in September they returned to Switzerland and settled in Küsnacht . The pepper mill was reopened on September 30th by Erika, Klaus Mann and Giehse in the Hotel Hirschen in Zurich . A successful tour through five Swiss cities followed from November to December 1933 and a second tour with a new program from May to June 1934. The third program from autumn 1934 was panned by the Swiss press and sparked riots. The ensemble therefore switched to Czechoslovakia , Belgium , Holland and Luxembourg . It was not until the end of 1935 that Die Pfeffermühle returned to Switzerland.

Christopher Isherwood and WH Auden (right, 1939)

Erika Mann blamed the bad press of the third program on the mother of her friend Annemarie Schwarzenbach Renée Schwarzenbach-Wille , a daughter of General Ulrich Wille , who accused her of having a bad influence on Annemarie and who also sympathized with National Socialism. The project has meanwhile been classified as anti-German by the German authorities and Erika Mann has been regarded as its “intellectual originator”. As a result, her German citizenship was revoked on June 11, 1935 . In addition to Erika Mann, the names Bertolt Brecht and Walter Mehring were on the expatriation list that day . A remedy was quickly found, because on June 15, 1935, through the mediation of Christopher Isherwood , a friend of Klaus Mann's, she married the unknown homosexual English writer WH Auden and thus obtained British citizenship. The pepper mill was performed in Switzerland and the Benelux countries until May 1936 and achieved a total of 1,034 appearances. Her political commitment, which was shown in her cabaret pieces, was recognized: “You are doing ten times more against barbarism than all of us writers put together,” wrote Joseph Roth in the spring of 1935 to Erika Mann.

American exile

Lecture tours in the USA as a lecturer

The New York borough of Manhattan, around 1931

In September 1936, Erika and Klaus Mann as well as Therese Giehse, Magnus Henning, Lotte Goslar and Sybille Schloß traveled to the USA to find a new venue for their cabaret, which in Europe could only be performed under strict conditions. The premiere of Peppermill took place on January 5, 1937 in New York .

Erika Mann lived in the Bedford Hotel in Manhattan , where, like her brother Klaus, she was often supposed to stay. The performances of the Peppermill failed, however, due to the lack of interest from the Americans, who did not know such an art form. For this reason Erika continued her work against National Socialism in a different way, published in newspapers and went on lecture tours as a lecturer , on which she lectured to various groups and associations. In March 1937 she spoke among other things at a mass event of the American Jewish Congress . She had great success with her lectures in the first few years and carried out this activity until 1948. Klaus Mann expresses himself in his autobiography The Turning Point on her work as a lecturer :

“The profession of 'lecturer' - virtually unknown in other parts of the world - is one of the peculiarities of American life. [...] Erika was able to become one of the most sought-after 'lecturers' on the continent because she has something worth hearing ('She has a message!') And because she makes what is worth hearing with a lovable intensity ('She has personality'). "

From 1937, her official year of immigration, Mann lived at times with the doctor and writer Martin Gumpert , who wanted to marry her and dissuade her from her unsteady lifestyle and drug use. However, she persisted in her way of life; her love for him knows no demands, and vice versa, she wants it that way too.

After insistent appeals and demands his daughter Erika Thomas Mann had published an open letter of 3 February 1936 Eduard Korrodi , who in the January 26, 1936 Zurich Neue Zeitung had a polemic against the emigrants literature clearly emigration and exile literature known and made his final break with National Socialist Germany public. The conflict between Thomas Mann and his eldest children about this confession, which had been smoldering since 1933, was thus resolved. In August 1933, for example, Erika had expressed herself bitterly in a letter to Klaus: "In our youth we have a great responsibility in the form of our underage father."

As a consequence of his solidarity-based position, Thomas Mann was also deprived of his German citizenship. Before the outbreak of the Second World War , the Mann couple emigrated to the USA in 1938, where Thomas Mann had received a visiting professorship at Princeton University .

In the USA, Erika Mann accompanied her father on his lecture tours in addition to her own obligations and, thanks to her good language skills, rendered him valuable service when he fought for accurate formulations and arguments after the lectures in the discussion with the audience, which she then presented for him. Erika edited and shortened his manuscripts and translated his texts into English. The liquidation of the household in Zurich was also in their hands.

Politically motivated book projects

Erika and Klaus Mann also traveled to Spain in 1938 to jointly produce reports on the Spanish Civil War , which were published under the title Back from Spain . Erika Mann's first documentary, School for Barbarians , was published in September . Education under the Nazis , which sold very successfully 40,000 copies in America within three months. The German edition Ten Million Children. The education of the youth in the Third Reich was published by the friend and publisher Fritz H. Landshoff in his exile publishing house Querido in Amsterdam. Landshoff had advertised Erika; she preferred a friendly relationship, but tried hard to dissuade him from his drug addiction, even though she was a drug user herself. In her role as a “mental health worker” she tried to alleviate the consequences of his episodes of depression. In 1939 she even proposed to Landshoff to marry, which he refused to her relief.

Erika Mann gave Escape to Life together with her brother Klaus in 1939 . German Culture in Exile and The Other Germany in 1940 . In the same year she was with illustrations provided second "political textbook," as she called her documentaries, The Lights Go Down ( When the lights go out ) with the theme "everyday under the Swastika" in London and New York published.

Tasks as a war correspondent

London houses destroyed in an air raid during The Blitz

From October to August 1940 and June to September 1941 Erika Mann worked as a correspondent for the British BBC in London on propaganda programs that were broadcast to Germany. During the German bombing raids ("The Blitz") in September 1940, she sent appeals to the Germans, explaining the futility of this war and prophesying that they would certainly lose it. Erika Mann herself was affected by the bombing, manuscripts and her typewriter were destroyed. She appealed to the Americans to join the war because Hitler was also threatening the American nation. Between her stays in London, she was on tour in the USA to give lectures.

From 1942 Erika Mann worked for the US propaganda agency Office of War Information in New York; In the same year, L. B. Fischer Verlag, New York, published her children's book A Gang of Ten (Eng. Ten chasing Mr. X ). The subject of the book had a sad background: the ship, the City of Benares , which was supposed to bring her sister Monika Mann and her husband Jenö Lányi to Canada, was sunk by a German submarine on September 18, 1940 in the middle of the North Atlantic. The sister was barely rescued, the brother-in-law was killed; of the 90 children on board the ship, only 13 survived the disaster. Erika Mann created a monument to them with A Gang of Ten . In the book she tells the story of ten children from different nations who put down Mister X, an agent of Hitler's, the trade.

War correspondents in 1944, Erika Mann on the far right and Betty Knox third from the right

From 1943 to 1945 Erika Mann was a war correspondent for various newspapers and was equal in status and pay to a US officer with the rank of captain . She was a war correspondent with the Ninth Army of the American armed forces and stayed in Egypt, Belgium, France and Palestine, among others. Also in 1943, she began writing her autobiography, titled I Of All People (dt. Ironically I ), but should remain a fragment. In her role as war correspondent, she was also there when the Western Allies landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944 . After Germany surrendered in May 1945, she was in her old home and saw the destroyed cities. Faced with perpetrators and fellow travelers, she wrote a field report, Alien Homeland , which she did not complete. In it, she condemned with irreconcilable severity the lewd attitude of some compatriots, who took refuge in self-pity and did not want to have anything to do with communal responsibility.

Bruno Walter with the young Yehudi Menuhin in 1931

During her military service, she met Betty Knox, who, like her, worked as a war correspondent, and had an affair with her, while at the same time she had a secret and unhappy liaison with thirty years older than Bruno Walter , the father of her childhood friends Lotte and Gretel Walter.

In 1945 Erika Mann wrote for the London Evening Standard about the first Nuremberg war crimes trial and gained entry to the prison in Mondorf-les-Bains , Luxembourg , where the representatives of the Nazi regime were held. As Mann reported in a letter, no woman has yet managed to enter this place. She saw in person among others Hermann Göring , Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Streicher , with whom she was not allowed to speak, so that she later sent interrogators to them and let the prisoners know their identity. Goering in particular was shocked and declared that had he handled the Mann case, the matter would have been handled differently: “'A German of T. M's format could certainly have been adapted to the Third Reich.' I wired all this and much more to the London Evening Standard , which made it big on the front page. ”Erika Mann traveled through Germany, her“ alien homeland ”, for a whole year and wrote reports on known and unknown Germans. At Ilse Hess, Rudolf Hess's wife , she appeared as “Mildred”, an apparently harmless, curious journalist.

From 1946 on, Erika Mann had to regularly interrupt her work on cures in various sanatoriums and health clinics due to her poor state of health due to years of alcohol and drug abuse.

Thomas Mann's "daughter adjutant"

Thomas Mann House, Pacific Palisades (2006)

From May to August 1947 she accompanied Thomas Mann on his first trip to Europe after the war. However, this trip did not lead to Germany. After the end of the war she had increasingly started to work for Thomas Mann as a “secretary, biographer, estate guardian, daughter-adjutant”, as he wrote in his diary. This role had certainly contributed to the estrangement between her and her brother: unlike Klaus Mann, who suffered from being the son of a world-famous father, the self-confident Erika did not feel overwhelmed by her father's fame, but found pleasure in her work for him. Since 1948 she lived in her parents' house in Pacific Palisades .

At the end of 1948, at a panel discussion in Stockton, California, she questioned the Germans' capacity for democracy. The West German press reacted indignantly, especially the Munich newspaper Echo der Woche insulted her as a “communist agent” and described her with her brother Klaus as “ Stalin's 5th column ”. Erika tried to obtain counter notifications and to file defamation suits. After a year and a half, however, she bitterly had to give up. On the joint trip to Europe in 1949, which Thomas Mann also took to Germany for the first time after the war, she decidedly refused to set foot on German soil. Thomas Mann, who saw himself as a mediator between East and West during the Cold War , therefore accepted the Goethe Prize from the cities of Frankfurt am Main and Weimar without Erika Mann.

Klaus Mann's suicide

Klaus Mann as a US sergeant in Italy (1944)

The suicide of her brother Klaus on May 21, 1949 in Cannes shook Erika Mann deeply, as she had tried for a long time to counteract his death wish. The loss of her beloved brother marked a deep turning point in her life. The friendship with Pamela Wedekind was broken after her marriage to Carl Sternheim, but after many years of silence, Erika Mann wrote a letter to Pamela Wedekind on June 16, in which she expressed her grief:

“He is buried in Cannes - I'm just coming back from there. I couldn't go to the funeral - from Stockholm - because of my parents, or at least because of our mother, and so I only went now. [...] I don't yet know how to live, just know that I have to; and yet I can't even think of it without him. "

In 1950 she published the memory book Klaus Mann zum Gedächtnis with a foreword by his father and contributions from friends such as Hermann Kesten and Upton Sinclair in Querido Verlag. She had translated her brother's last essay, The Visitation of the European Spirit , and included it in the book; However, their translation and editing was not mentioned on the front page.

Consequences of the McCarthy era

Erika Mann and her brother Klaus, like almost all German exiles, had been under observation by the FBI since June 1940 , to which she herself had offered to work “to expose fascist spies and saboteurs” after she and Thomas Mann had received pronational socialist letters and anonymous threats. Erika Mann had presumably contacted the Attorney General General Francis Briddle personally. In the almost 200-page dossier on Erika Mann, she was described as a “sexually perverted” and “an active agent of the Comintern ”. Erika Mann only found out about the surveillance in 1948 and tried to refute the allegations. However, during the Cold War of the McCarthy era, the political climate in the United States intensified, and that affected the entire Mann family. While Erika Mann had her most successful tours as “lecturer” in 1946 with 92 dates, the following year she was only offered 20 dates; between 1949 and 1950 her agent canceled promises: Erika Mann was considered dangerous and un-American.

In December 1950, Erika Mann withdrew her application for American citizenship, which she had submitted in 1947 and had still not been approved, with a letter of complaint to the competent authority:

“Nazism drove me out of my native Germany, where I had been quite successful; Hitler's growing influence in Europe made me leave the continent; [...] and now I see myself - through no fault of my own - ruined in a country that I love and of which I had hoped to become a citizen. "

Return to Switzerland

Film and book projects

The house at Alten Landstrasse 39 in Kilchberg, 2009. At the entrance a plaque with the names and dates of the Mann family.
Erika Mann hugs her father during the Schiller ceremony in Weimar (1955)

Erika Mann left the USA with her parents in 1952. As in 1933, they chose Switzerland as their new home, because a return to Germany was out of the question because of the largely unreasonable attitude of their compatriots with regard to coming to terms with National Socialism. Since Bruno Walter had remarried in 1948, her liaison ended and Erika Mann did not want to enter into a permanent relationship, she decided to live with her parents. The Mann family lived in Erlenbach near Zurich until 1954 . Erika devoted herself again to writing children's books, so in 1952 her children's book Our Magic Uncle Muck was published as a new edition (original title Muck, der Zauberonkel , 1934); It followed in 1953 Christoph flies to America , a new edition of the Stoffel , and the first episodes of the four-part Migratory Bird series (until 1956). She also worked on the scripts for the film adaptations of Thomas Mann's novels Royal Highness (1953), later Confessions of the impostor Felix Krull (1957) and Buddenbrooks (1959). Her greatest concern was the faithful implementation of the cinematic representations; other views were not tolerated by her. She also influenced the casting of the film roles. In the first two films she played in supporting roles: In Royal Highness she was head nurse Amalie and in Kurt Hoffmann's Felix Krull a governess.

In 1954 Erika Mann and her parents moved to Kilchberg on Lake Zurich , to the villa on Alte Landstrasse 39, Thomas Mann's (and also her) “last address”. In an article of the same name, she later described the places where the Mann family lived. Unlike in 1949, she accompanied her father on his last trips to Germany in 1955, including to Stuttgart and Weimar in the GDR , where he gave his lecture on Schiller on the 150th anniversary of the death of Friedrich Schiller , and to Lübeck for Award of honorary citizenship.

Work on the estate of Klaus and Thomas Mann

She devoted the later years to processing the estate of her father Thomas Mann, who died on August 12, 1955 a few months after his 80th birthday. In 1956 she published The Last Year. Report about my father , in which she spoke about Thomas Mann's last year of life with all honors and events. A memory book by her sister Monika Mann with the title Past and Present , which appeared at the same time and which reported rather skeptically about the father, led to tensions between the siblings, as Erika denied her the ability to report objectively on the family history. The press rated both books, and both publications were received positively, with Gustav Hillard favoring Monika's memoirs, pointing out that “Monika's book has a completely unique tone, which has its decided charm, but also its danger”, among other things because it is a show realistic picture of Thomas Mann.

From 1961 to 1965 Erika Mann edited a three-volume edition of selected letters from Thomas Mann. She also looked after the works of her brother Klaus. So she found the publisher in Berthold Spangenberg and in Martin Gregor-Dellin the editor for the republication of the first Klaus Mann work edition in separate editions in the Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung from 1963. Her brother was said to be an important writer who was only disregarded by the restorative attitude of post-war Germany to be rediscovered. Until her death she was involved in the legal disputes over the new edition of his Mephisto .

In the spring of 1958 she sustained a complicated fracture of the left metatarsal bone on a staircase in Kilchberg's house and in September 1960 a fracture of the femoral neck; the consequence was a restriction of mobility due to progressive atrophy . Her health deteriorated increasingly. She would have loved to write a book about the pepper mill. “But let me be,” she wrote to a friend on September 13, 1963. "I am a pale legacy and am not allowed to do anything down here other than publish volumes of letters, anthologies and the like of my dear dead."

The last few years

Kilchberg Church

She gambled away a lot of sympathies through her willingness to process and aggressive quarrels in the later years. “The Amazon became an Erinnye ”, wrote the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki in his book Thomas Mann und die Seinen . The relationship with the mother and the siblings was increasingly tense. Katia Mann complained in a letter to her twin brother Klaus Pringsheim on August 5, 1961 :

“What spoils my old days [...] is the more than unfriendly relationship of all my children to the good fat elder [...]. On the other hand, [Erika] is extremely sensitive and suspicious, and depends to an exaggerated degree on me, which is not right for me, since I have to be constantly considerate of her. "

Memorial plaque on the Kilchberg family grave

In January 1968, she gave the writer and essayist Fritz J. Raddatz a television interview that WDR broadcast. When he asked why she had not pursued her elucidation with a pointed pen since 1952, although her integrity and ability to articulate was predestined to comment on world politics and the student unrest, she answered frankly: "I am very burned Child. ”After the experiences in Germany, then in European exile, then in American exile with the shock of the McCarthy era, she did not want to start a fourth time. That is "the sad truth", meanwhile her place is "between all chairs", but the place is perhaps not that bad after all. However, if you called her, she would not refuse.

Erika Mann died of a brain tumor on August 27, 1969 in the Zurich Cantonal Hospital . She was buried in the family grave in the Kilchberg cemetery. During the funeral service on August 30, 1969, the Stuttgart writer and theologian Albrecht Goes gave the funeral speech and quoted Heinrich Heine's “Guten Tambour”, whose “holy restlessness” drums people out of their sleep.

The literary work

Early journalistic and literary work

“The next stop was Boston , where 'old American culture' is supposed to be found. Boston is the most European city in the United States and its atmosphere is English. Nothing can be more un-American than these quiet streets with the low houses where the fine and withdrawn citizens live. Some parts of the city are almost reminiscent of Bremen. "

- Erika and Klaus Mann : All around , page 59

Erika Mann's literary work began in 1928 with journalistic publications, above all she wrote glosses for the Berlin daily Tempo , as well as occasional texts for Ford im Bild , the advertising magazine of the Ford automobile group , which were only found a few years ago. It continued in 1929 with the cheerful travel book Rundherum , in which she, together with her brother Klaus, processed the experiences from the joint trip around the world. In an advertisement in the Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel on January 19, 1929, Fischer Verlag advertised the book by the Mann siblings: “In your travel book you do not make any critical remarks or reflections on countries and people. They look around with curious young eyes and tell simply and vividly what they saw and what they encountered. ”Another common travel book from the early days is The Book of the Riviera from 1931.

The brother co-wrote Erika Mann's play Plagiarism, a comedy in five pictures - it also dates from 1931. The plagiarism manuscript , with scenes from the Berlin theater and intellectual milieu, was considered lost for a long time. It was only found in the estate of a Klaus Mann collector in the early 1990s. A reading of this piece took place on the occasion of Erika Mann's 100th birthday on February 14, 2005 in the Ernst-Deutsch-Theater in Hamburg . The Christmas play Jan's Wunderhündchen , written together with Ricki Hallgarten . A children's play in seven pictures had its premiere in Darmstadt in 1932, but was later not performed.

The pepper mill

“[…] As early as January 33 in Munich one could no longer be direct - we were indirect. We did everything with fairy tales, parables and parables of all kinds - we never named a name, never named a country, we were indirect, completely clear to our audience. "

- Erika Mann in conversation with Fritz J. Raddatz (1969)

With the establishment of the Pfeffermühle in early 1933, Erika Mann successfully tried her hand as a copywriter, lecturer and conférencière in the small art form of cabaret. Here she was able to combine her acting skills with her writing and organizational talent. The Pfeffermühle was a “cabaret stage”, the texts of which were modeled on the models of Klabund , Christian Morgenstern and Joachim Ringelnatz . Thomas Mann gave the cabaret its name. About 85 percent of the lyrics came from Erika Mann herself. After a very successful start, political circumstances prevented further performances in Germany. In response to a criticism published in the Pariser Tageblatt in January 1934 by Ludwig Marcuse , who was already living in exile in Paris , that the pepper mill was too “mild” in its appearance, Erika Mann wrote angrily in a letter to Klaus: “Who is being expelled? or we, if we pepper more? ”After a total of 1,034 performances in European exile, the Peppermill failed at the beginning of 1937 in New York due to the lack of interest from the American public.

Children's books

Envelope from Ricki Hallgarten

"For Medi and Bibi, because they are my siblings and because they wanted to be"

- Dedication by Erika Mann for her siblings Elisabeth and Michael in Stoffel flies over the sea

Erika Mann's first children's book, Stoffel Flies über Meer, with illustrations by her childhood friend Ricki Hallgarten from 1932, was a great success, it had ten editions within a short time and was translated into many languages. It was followed in 1934 by Muck, the magician uncle ; With both books she achieved a greater degree of popularity among the German reading public, but it fell short of the popularity of her father and brother. A friend of the family man who Anglist Hans Reisiger , praised the "BZ am Mittag" of 12 December 1932 the Stoffel was "the most beautiful, richest and warmest children's book I since Erich Kastner's Emil and the Detectives and Kipling Fischer guys read have".

Works created in American exile

“One world - a single, moderately large world that has space for everyone, but not for everything. And for what, certainly not? The word is flat and we preferred to avoid it. It is inevitable. What stands behind him has enveloped the earth in smoke and flames and must be ostracized according to the laws of the new world. It's called: Nationalism! "

- Erika Mann : Thoughts in the tea parlor , May 28, 1943

The majority of Erika Mann's works belong to exile literature , including what she calls the political textbook Ten Million Children. The education of the youth in the Third Reich (School for Barbarians. Education under the Nazis) in 1938; With this work she succeeded in enlightening a great deal about the political situation in Germany in the USA. For the first time, she found her own narrative style by mixing documentary material with stories she had experienced herself. Escape to Life followed a year later , a kind of who's who of exiles, which Erika Mann wrote in cooperation with her brother Klaus. In 1940, the publication The Other Germany was created , in which the Mann siblings critically examined their country of birth. In the same year Erika Mann wrote her second political textbook The Lights Go Down . A German translation back from English, since the German manuscript must be considered lost, was only published in 2005 under the title When the Lights Go Out. Stories from the Third Reich on the occasion of her 100th birthday. In addition, in her capacity as “lecturer” and war correspondent, numerous essays, statements and commentaries have been written for newspapers and magazines.

Another children's book A Gang of Ten appeared in 1942, later it was in Germany under the title chase tens of Mr. X published. A new edition with an afterword written by Uwe Naumann was published by Rowohlt Verlag on the occasion of the 50th year of her death in 2019 .

The late work, posthumous publications

“Your relationship with Doctor Bermann and his house is indestructible, - you seem ready to make sacrifices to all of them. If it means a sacrifice for you, that you gradually but surely get lost, -: put it with the rest of it. For me it is sad and terrible. I am your child E. "

- Final sentence of Erika Mann's letter of January 19, 1936 on the subject of “Emigration” to Thomas Mann

In the post-war period Erika Mann wrote The Last Year. Report about my father (1956) and The Migratory Birds - Children's Book Series (1953 to 1956), to which the titles Till bei den Migvögeln , The Migratory Birds on Europe Voyage and The Migratory Birds Sing in Paris and Rome belong. Furthermore, the children's books Stoffel flies over the sea and Muck, the magic uncle - under the titles Christoph flies to America (1952) and Our magic uncle Muck (1953) - were published in new editions by Franz Schneider in Munich. In 1959, the Scherz Verlag in Bern published the four editions of the Migratory Birds stories in the anthology Die Zugvögel. Choir boys on an adventurous journey .

In 1996 a collection of letters and essays by Erika Mann was published under the title Mein Vater, der Zauberer posthumously, which among other things traces the arduous path with which the author led Thomas Mann to reject the National Socialist regime definitively between 1933 and 1936. Another posthumous collection of essays is Lightning Over the Ocean , published in 2000, which also included her fragmentary autobiography, Ausgerechte Ich . For the first time, her most important journalistic works, many of which have not yet been printed, have been brought together in one book.

reception

“Why are we so cold? / Why, - that hurts! / Why? We will soon / How loud ice and snow! / Participate - it's about your earth! / And you alone, you have all the power! / Make sure it gets a little warmer / In our bad, cold winter night! "

- Erika Mann : Song aus Kälte , 2nd episode of the “Pfeffermühle” program in exile on January 1, 1934

Effect during lifetime

After the pacifist women's assembly in Munich on January 13, 1932, at which Erika Mann appeared as a speaker at the beginning of her political work, the National Socialist Kampfblatt, the Völkischer Beobachter , attacked the speaker three days later on the front page with the malicious words: “Ein A particularly disgusting chapter was the appearance of Erika Mann, who […] dedicated her 'art' to the salvation of peace. A blasé young man in posture and gesture, she brought up her blooming nonsense about the 'German future'. "This was followed by an undisguised threat also against Erika Mann's relatives:" The chapter 'Mann family' is expanding into a Munich scandal, which too must find its liquidation in due course. "

When the Pfeffermühle was founded on January 1, 1933, Klaus Mann described in his autobiography The Turning Point the large part that his sister played in the success of the literary and political cabaret program: “The texts of most of the numbers -  chansons , recitations, skits  - were by Erika ( some also from me); Erika was emcee [sic] , director, organizer; Erika sang, acted, inspired, in short, was the soul of it all. "

Erika Mann's multifaceted anti-fascist work in exile and after the end of the war mentions her nephew Frido Mann , who himself grew up in California, from her own perspective and not without admiration: “She looked like an Amazon, tempered by the victory over Nazi barbarism, that I will remember for a long time of her English uniform and I could never hear enough of their adventure reports from the London bombing war, the fighting in partly still occupied France and then of their almost apocalyptic encounters with the Nazi war criminals convicted in Nuremberg. ”But the consequences of her two Campaigns waged across the continents, beginning with the political-literary cabaret Die Pfeffermühle and continuing with her work as a war correspondent, were obvious; they only came to light after her return to Europe in the fifties and accelerated her increasing disruption and illness, especially after her death theirs Father ”.

Frido Mann writes about her personal charisma in his biography Achterbahn : “In her advocacy for democratic and humanistic values, she is always an actress from head to toe. Her facial expressions, every movement of her body, her choice of words and articulation appear like rehearsed theatrical play, but without being artificial or affected. "He continues with the assumption of the family that Erika Mann" wore Creole in her demeanor and in her whole personality - Her grandmother Julia's brazilian inheritance in itself ”.

In the later years of her life in Kilchberg, however, the problematic, idiosyncratic sides of Erika Mann particularly came to the fore. In diaries and letters it is shown that the family members suffered from their opinionated, domineering manner; Shortly after Erika's death, on a visit to the Kilchberg house, the youngest brother, Michael Mann, freely dropped the remark: “It's actually quite cozy here now.” And Erika Mann's youngest sister Elisabeth Mann Borgese expresses herself in Breloer's docu-drama The Manns - A novel of the century with a certain perplexity about the course of Erika's Manns life:

“Erika was extremely talented - as an actress, as a writer, as a journalist, as an entrepreneur, as everything ... And she had a charm that few have. So what more could you want in life? But she has just destroyed her life very much, and yet she actually died very sadly. And you always ask yourself: why, why? "

Voices about the work

Erika Mann's legacy work for Thomas Mann and Klaus Mann later provoked criticism because she did not shy away from deletions when editing the texts for the planned editions. The Klaus Mann expert Fredric Kroll points out in his epilogue to the new edition of the turning point in 2006 that Thomas Mann himself was a controversial author in conservative Germany in the 1950s. Therefore, in the selected edition of Thomas Mann's letters, passages related to his inclination to homosexuality were deleted, and in Klaus Mann's The Turning Point , Erika Mann weakened in collaboration with a Fischer lecturer (in 1950 the publishing rights to Klaus Mann's works were from Querido to the Fischer-Verlag passed), among other things, passages that dealt with Gustaf Gründgens or related to Klaus Mann's homosexuality, drug addiction and thoughts of death. It may have been a reason to put the authors in the most favorable light, and the fear of being tried for insult will also have played a role.

Marcel Reich-Ranicki sums up on January 18, 1986 in the FAZ : “If the impression is not deceptive, this highly gifted and extremely temperamental woman was not given the opportunity to live in peace with herself: who was once expelled from Germany is one Stayed driven. In addition, she was probably not spared deep personal disappointments. ”This thoroughly critical formulation about Erika Mann's personality shows the ambivalence that shows her life and work, because Reich-Ranicki continues in his book Thomas Mann und die sein :“ You wrote swift reports and bold correspondent reports; she was a political journalist who had to be certified as independent and decisive even if one could not share her views. "

In the epilogue of Blitze überm Ozean , a first publication of their fragmentary autobiography Ausgereglich Ich and numerous essays, speeches, reports (so the subtitle) from 2000, the editors Irmela von der Lühe and Uwe Naumann describe Erika Mann's literary intentions: “The material for she collected the books on her travels and while working as a war correspondent; it was mostly used for lectures and public appearances. Originality was less important than authenticity; books and lectures, essays and radio reports were intended not for eternity and its fame, but for the moment, to educate people about the present. "

Appreciation

The journalist Margrit barley manifests itself in 2000 inspired in the time about lightning above the ocean and explains the late release of Erika's texts in Germany with the aftermath of the Cold War:

“She had everything that makes a great reporter and publicist: a keen eye, an unerring sense for the essentials, an independent spirit and of course powerful language. On top of that, she had a sense of humor and temperament. She was a vehement seeker of truth and a moralist in the times of lies and squalor between 1933 and 1945 and the disgusting friend-foe thinking in the Cold War. […] The reason why Erika Mann did not become a sought-after journalist in post-war Germany has a lot to do with the Cold War, which crushed many a free spirit, but which suited the Nazis very well. "

Reviews on Viola Roggenkamps Erika Mann. A Jewish daughter

Erika Mann's biographer Irmela von der Lühe and well-known Mann experts such as Inge and Walter Jens or Heinrich Breloer did not adequately follow the effects of Katia Mann's and her children's Jewish descent in their works - at least that's what the writer Viola Roggenkamp claims . The American writer Ruth Klüger reviews Roggenkamp's book Erika Mann under the title Denied Judaism in Die Welt 2005 . A Jewish daughter. About the exquisite and the denied in the Mann-Pringsheim family , which reveals a new, if perhaps too one-sided view of the Mann family:

"According to Rogge Kamp Erika Mann their Jewish origin denied maternal consistent, in the sense that they never panelist himself as a Jew, and this denial, it concludes a psychological repression came in Freud 's sense 'is that in Erika's life, writing and thinking was bad, or at least stressful. One can doubt this or that detail in the quickly written and polemical book, but the author is certainly right when she thinks it should be suspicious when a daughter from a prominent and only partially assimilated family (Katia Mann's mother was baptized, It was not old Pringsheim) during the great persecution of the Jews to which she would have fallen victim in Germany, did not deal with her Jewish heritage, but consistently pretended that it did not even exist. […] So this gifted woman gradually became Thomas Mann's daughter and nothing more. The all too close bond with an extremely self-centered father blocked her way into her own life. "

Manfred Koch sees Roggenkamp's book less positively and in his review in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in 2005 refers to Erika Mann's anti-fascist work, which she did in the context of her convictions and not for the sake of her Jewish roots:

“One is amazed at the great judge's attitude of the author, who is not afraid to put possible critics of her proceedings under suspicion of anti-Semitism right from the start. Roggenkamp pays homage to a diffuse essentialism of 'being Jewish', which relieves her of more precise historical considerations. […] At the beginning of the Empire, almost two thirds of German Jews were part of the country's economic and cultural elite; the religious ties and ways of life of the past had moved a long way from them. [...] The Pringsheims 'and many others' disinterest in their Jewish heritage is therefore not due to pathological repression or betrayal. Erika Mann fought anti-Semitism wherever it encountered her. The fact that, according to her self-image, she did it not as a Jew but as a democratic humanist - who can blame her for that? "

Honors

Additional street sign in Hamburg with a short introduction

A primary school in Berlin that advocates equal social treatment has been named after her since November 8, 1999. The politician of the same name Erika Mann is the godmother of this school.

In 2004, on the occasion of her 100th birthday in 2005, “Erika-Mann-Strasse” (near Donnersbergerbrücke) was named after her in Munich. And by resolution of December 18, 2006, the Senate of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg named a street in the Barmbek-Süd district with "Erika-Mann-Bogen"; it is one of two newly laid streets in a new building area on the former site of the Eilbek hospital , the naming of which, at the request of the GAL , should correspond to the criteria of "persecuted persons under National Socialism" and "woman".

Irmela von der Lühe, curator of the Erika Mann exhibition in the Monacensia

The Munich literary archive Monacensia is dedicating a first solo exhibition to Erika Mann entitled Erika Mann. Cabaret Artist - War Reporter - Political Speaker , which runs from October 11, 2019 to September 13, 2020. The patron is Frido Mann . The exhibition curator Irmela von der Lühe presents Erika Mann as a "personality of a singular format". In addition, Monacensia initiated an interesting networking campaign with various cultural institutions in order to expand the spectrum to include Erika Mann.

Works in German editions (selection)

  • Ten chasing Mr. X . Translated from the English by Elga Abramowitz. Kinderbuch Verlag GmbH, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-358-01562-9 ; New edition with an afterword by Uwe Naumann , Rowohlt, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-499-21851-4 .
    • Original edition A Gang of Ten. LB Fischer, New York 1942
  • Ten million children. The education of the youth in the Third Reich . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1997, ISBN 3-499-22169-1 .
  • My father the magician . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1998, ISBN 3-499-22282-5 . (Contains the correspondence with Thomas and Katia Mann from 1919–1955 as well as essays, statements, comments and The Last Year. Report on my father .)
  • Letters and Answers. Edited by Anna Zanco-Prestel. New edition: Rowohlt, Reinbek 1998, ISBN 3-498-04420-6 .
  • Lightning over the ocean, essays, speeches, reports . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2001, ISBN 3-499-23107-7 . (Contains the fragmentary autobiography Ironically Me and her most important, in part previously unpublished journalistic works.)
  • Stoffel flies over the sea. With pictures by Richard Hallgarten, afterword by Dirk Heisserer . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2005, ISBN 3-499-21331-1 .
  • Jan's wonder dog. A children's piece in seven pictures. (Together with Richard Hallgarten). With an explanation from Erika Mann. Ed. And with an afterword by Dirk Heisserer. Thomas Mann series, found pieces 1. peniope. Anja Gärtig Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3-936609-20-9 .
  • Me of all people. A reader . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2005, ISBN 3-499-24158-7 .
  • The last year. Report on my father . New edition: Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16637-3 .
  • When the lights go out Stories from the Third Reich . Rowohlt, Reinbek 2006, ISBN 3-499-24413-6 .

Together with Klaus Mann:

  • All around . S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin 1929, new edition: All around. Adventure of a world tour . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1996, ISBN 3-499-13931-6 .
  • The Book of the Riviera. What is not in the "Baedeker" . Vol. XIV, Piper, Munich 1931. Reprint: Rowohlt, Reinbek 2003, ISBN 3-499-23667-2 ; New edition Kindler, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-463-40715-9 .
  • Escape to Life , translated from German into English by Mary Hottinger-Mackie. Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1939. German original edition: Escape to Life. German culture in exile . edition spangenberg, Munich 1991; Rowohlt, Reinbek 1996, ISBN 3-499-13992-8 .

Literature about Erika Mann (and family)

Movie

Web links

Commons : Erika Mann  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Erika Mann  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thomas Mann / Heinrich Mann: Briefwechsel 1900–1949 , p. 109
  2. ^ Thomas Mann: Diaries 1918–1921 , entry from March 10, 1920
  3. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Thomas Mann and his own , p. 184
  4. ↑ Golo Mann: My sister Erika . In: Erika Mann, Briefe II , p. 241
  5. ↑ Klaus Mann: The turning point , p. 102
  6. ↑ Erika and Klaus Mann: All around . Afterword by Uwe Naumann, p. 146
  7. ↑ Klaus Mann: The turning point , p. 262
  8. ↑ Klaus Mann: The turning point , p. 331 f.
  9. ↑ Axel Schock, Karen-Susan Fessel: OUT! - 800 famous lesbians, gays and bisexuals , Querverlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-89656-111-1 , entry Giehse Therese , p. 114, cf. Gunna Wendt : Erika and Therese. Erika Mann and Therese Giehse - A love between art and war, Munich 2018
  10. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , pp. 102-104
  11. ↑ Hildegard Möller: The women of the Mann family , Piper, Munich 2005, p. 175
  12. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 122
  13. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 129
  14. ↑ Klaus Mann describes in his turning point on page 491 a lecturer as a well paid, agent-mediated lecture traveler who could be a novelist, tennis player as well as polar explorer and who chatted about his topic in front of various groups and associations. Both Klaus and Erika Mann had no academic degrees. 
  15. ↑ Klaus Mann: The turning point , p. 491 f.
  16. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann p. 179 f.
  17. ↑ Erika Mann: Letters I , p. 74
  18. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 214 ff.
  19. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 244 f.
  20. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 247
  21. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 260
  22. ↑ Uwe Naumann (Ed.): Die Kinder der Manns , p. 200
  23. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 278 f .; Erika Mann: Letters I , p. 206 f.
  24. ↑ Thomas Mann: Diaries 1946–1948 , p. 219
  25. ↑ Katharina Sykora: Erika Mann in America. Here she spoke , faz.net, June 28, 2020, accessed on July 8, 2020
  26. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann p. 269 f.
  27. ↑ Erika Mann: Letters and Answers Vol. 1 , p. 260 f.
  28. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 300
  29. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 207 f.
  30. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 304
  31. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 322 f.
  32. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 350
  33. ↑ Helga Keizer-Hayne: Erika Mann and her political cabaret “Die Pfeffermühle” 1933–1937 p. 196
  34. ^ Reich-Ranicki: Thomas Mann und die Seinen , p. 183
  35. ↑ Walter Jens: Mrs. Thomas Mann , p. 282 f.
  36. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 359 f. Wording of the interview in the Erika Mann archive of the Monacensia, Munich
  37. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 366
  38. ↑ S. Björn Weyand: Funny descriptions of the experiences with the faithful Ford . Four texts by Erika Mann for the magazine Ford im Bild (documentation and commentary). In: Berliner Hefte zur Geschichte des literary Lebens 5 (2003), pp. 130–147
  39. ↑ Erika and Klaus Mann: Rundherum , p. 149
  40. ↑ Erika Mann in conversation with Fritz J. Raddatz in a broadcast on WDR, 1969
  41. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 385
  42. ↑ Erika Mann: Stoffel flies over the sea , afterword of the new edition 2005, p. 123; see. Manfred Berger : Erika Mann, in: Baumgärtner, AC / Kurt, F./Pleticha, H. (Ed.): Children's and youth literature. A lexicon, Meitingen 1999 (7th supplement).
  43. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 11, 371. In: Die Zeitung
  44. ↑ Reviews at perlentaucher
  45. ↑ Erika Mann: My father, the magician , p. 93
  46. ↑ Helga Keizer-Hayne: Erika Mann and her political cabaret “Die Pfeffermühle” 1933–1937 , p. 108
  47. ↑ Irmela von der Lühe: Erika Mann , p. 88
  48. ↑ Klaus Mann: The turning point , p. 385
  49. ↑ Uwe Naumann: The children of the men. A family album , p. 10 (introduction by Frido Mann)
  50. ↑ Frido Mann: roller coaster , p. 23 f.
  51. ↑ Uwe Naumann (Ed.): Die Kinder der Manns , p. 16
  52. ↑ Breloer / Königstein: Die Manns , p. 424
  53. ↑ Klaus Mann: The turning point , afterword by Fredric Kroll, p. 874 ff.
  54. ↑ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Thomas Mann and his own , p. 180
  55. ↑ Margrit Gerste: Of all people - finally: The publicist Erika Mann can be read in German . In: Die Zeit , No. 43/2000
  56. ↑ Ruth Klüger: Denied Judaism . In: Die Welt , December 31, 2005. Book review about Viola Roggenkamp's Erika Mann. A Jewish Daughter (accessed July 22, 2008)
  57. ^ Neue Zürcher Zeitung , November 5, 2005, review
  58. ↑ Erika Mann. Cabaret artist - war reporter - political speaker , muenchner-stadtbibliothek.de, accessed on October 10, 2019
  59. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D1kmXPxQhM%7CSee also the virtual tour of the exhibition by Irmela von der Lühe
  60. ↑ https://blog.muenchner-stadtbibliothek.de/vernetzungaktion-erika-mann-anstand-freiheit-toleranz-erikamann-maerz-2020/ accessed on March 31, 2020
  61. ↑ https://wakelet.com/wake/7bf83ced-d137-46d5-a78e-ef7e2345db0a accessed on March 31, 2020
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on August 1, 2008 in this version .
personal data
SURNAME Man, Erika
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mann, Erika Julia Hedwig (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German actress, cabaret artist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 9, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich , German Empire
DATE OF DEATH August 27, 1969
Place of death Zurich , Switzerland