Herbert Thomas Mandl

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Herbert Thomas Mandl in Miami Beach, FL, USA, 1990

Herbert Thomas Mandl (born on August 18, 1926 in Bratislava ; died on February 22, 2007 in Meerbusch - Büderich ) was a Czech-German-Jewish author, concert violinist, music professor, philosopher, inventor, speaker. He wrote novels, short stories and dramas that are closely linked to his extraordinary fate.

Life

Slavi and Tommy Mandl around 1978

As a young man he survived the Theresienstadt , Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps . As a violin professor in Ostrava , he pursued various projects to escape the oppression in communist Czechoslovakia to the West. He finally managed to escape when he was able to leave a tour group in Cairo and ask for asylum at the US embassy there. Initially suspected of being a spy by the CIA and interrogated for months, he was released to the Zirndorf reception camp . Recognized as a political refugee, he came to Cologne and became Heinrich Böll's private secretary . Mandl's wife, the concert pianist Jaroslava (“Slavi”) Mandl, stayed behind in Ostrava. Böll drove with his wife and son Raimund in a car to Czechoslovakia, in which a hiding place had been built with the help of a magician, and smuggled Slavi into the West with it.

Later Mandl edited cultural programs for Czechoslovakia at Deutsche Welle in Cologne. He tried to emigrate to the United States with his wife twice. One of his jobs there was that of a "lunatic" in an institution for criminal psychopaths in Washington state . When he finally returned to Germany, he found a job as a teacher specializing in English at the Episcopal Evening High School in Neuss.

He was also an inventor. He designed and patented two very different devices. One was a transparent artificial head ("Phonetichead"), inside of which the externally adjustable speech organs were visible, in order to help language students with pronunciation problems. The other was a “suggestometer”, a complex device that can be used to measure the susceptibility of a subject to be influenced - something that empirical psychology generally considers impossible. In retirement he became a hugely successful psychotherapist . In his final years he appeared as a contemporary witness to musical life in the Theresienstadt ghetto; he had played the violin in the prisoners' orchestra there in 1943/44 .

Literary work

The central theme of his literary work is the struggle of the individual against the refined instruments of totalitarian oppression: secret services, psychological torture, brainwashing. Similar to Edgar Allan Poe (e.g. The Pit and the Pendulum ), with Mandl the individual is faced with the ingenious torture of his overpowering adversaries with his rationality alone. Similar to Aldous Huxley ( Eyeless in Gaza ), Mandl's effective storytelling is interspersed with philosophical considerations that are kept in extremely clear language. His novel Die Wette des Philosophen (1996) is also remarkable for the fact that it depicts both the stressed everyday life and the amazingly intense cultural and musical life in Theresienstadt.

estate

Thomas Mandl's estate is deposited in the Moses Mendelssohn Academy in Halberstadt . In May 2014 the literary scholar Mirjana Stancic began to develop the holdings in Halberstadt.

Works

Fiction

  • The hero and his secret. Short stories, Bernardus, 1991.
  • Thirst, music, secret services. Autobiography, Boer, 1995.
  • The Philosopher's Bet. Roman, Boer, 1996.
  • On the island of the phantoms. Roman, Dittrich, 2003.
  • Love and corruption with phantoms. Roman, Wishbohn Verlag Mülheim adRuhr, 2005.
  • 1994–2000: Fiction published in the Czech Republic

Other unpublished stories, dramas and lectures on philosophical and political topics can be found in the Mandl estate in the archive of the Moses Mendelssohn Academy in Halberstadt.

Movie

  • Unknown Böll / The Nobel Prize Winner as a courageous escape helper Film by Gloria de Siano. 3sat culture journal January 14, 2004

theatre

  • The journey to the center of reality (performances in Hallein and Klagenfurt, Austria, world premiere by ARBOS Society for Music and Theater 1997)
  • The triple dream of the machine (performances in Prora / Rügen, Germany; Salzburg, Villach and Arnoldstein; first performance by ARBOS Society for Music and Theater 2004)
  • The adjourned heroic death (Prora / Rügen, Germany; Villach and Arnoldstein, Austria; world premiere by ARBOS Society for Music and Theater 2005)
  • The goal of the missing (Arnoldstein, Austria; world premiere by ARBOS Society for Music and Theater 2006)
  • Other stage works: The Brain Piano or The Second Experiment , The Guest from Transcendence , The Supernatural Conspiracy , Interrogations with uncertain results

Opera

  • Šarlatán / Der Scharlatan Opera by Pavel Haas , German version by Herbert Thomas Mandl and Jaroslava Mandl (Czech National Library 1993)

Quotes

  • “As long as you are still crawling and fleeing, you should open your beak as a contemporary witness of the National Socialist era” - Herbert Thomas Mandl at the premiere of his drama The Journey into the Center of Reality in 1997

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.moses-mendelssohn-akademie.de
  2. ↑ [1] , As long as one crawls and flee (1997)

Web links

Commons : Herbert Thomas Mandl  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Mandl, Herbert Thomas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jewish-Czech musician, philosopher and writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 18, 1926
PLACE OF BIRTH Bratislava
DATE OF DEATH February 22, 2007
Place of death Meerbusch-Büderich