Julia Löhr

Julia Löhr as a toddler with her mother and her brothers Heinrich and Thomas

Julia Elisabeth Therese Löhr (nee Mann , called Lula ; * August 13, 1877 in Lübeck ; † May 10, 1927 in Starnberg ) was a sister of Heinrich and Thomas Mann . She was the archetype of the fictional character Ines Institoris in Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus .

Life

Julia Mann, like her siblings Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Carla Mann and Viktor Mann, grew up in an upper-class family in Lübeck. In 1893 the family moved to Munich. In 1900, Julia Mann was the first of her siblings to marry Josef Löhr, bank director who was fifteen years her senior, who was viewed with reservations by the Mann family , although he offered his wife a financially secure position. She had three daughters with him, their daughter Eva Maria was born in 1901, and the twins Ilsemarie and Rosemarie were born in 1907. At this point, Julia Mann probably already had several extramarital relationships, and she was also considered dependent on morphine. Golo Mann attributed this slide into drug addiction to the disgust his aunt felt for her husband and his claims. After his death in 1922, she lost her livelihood due to inflation and hanged herself in 1927.

Thomas Mann probably owed his sister Julia a detailed written report about their aunt Elisabeth , the archetype of Tony Buddenbrook . Apparently Julia had a talent for writing, but couldn't make a career out of it. Their escape into middle-class married life presumably did not satisfy their demands, which for many is regarded as a reason for their suicide. As early as 1908, Thomas Mann told his brother Heinrich that Julia deserved “a lot of pity” and felt more deeply touched by her suicide than by the suicide of her younger sister Carla Mann in 1910. His son Klaus Mann also pays tribute in his autobiography Der Turning point of the tragically deceased aunt respect.

Apart from the report on Elisabeth Mann, Julia Mann does not seem to have written any major coherent texts. Indirectly, she probably also provided her brother with the basic conception for the murder on the tram, which he used in Doctor Faustus . Such a murder of the 35-year-old musician Gustav Adolf Gunkel took place in Dresden in 1901 . After her second divorce, her aunt Elisabeth lived with her children Alice and Henry there at Johannstrasse 15, today's Regerstrasse 27. When Julia Mann visited her, she got to know the distel family, who were extensively related and who lived nearby. Later she probably also mediated the acquaintance of the family of the state archivist Theodor Distel , in which the brothers Carl and Paul Ehrenberg also lived, with her brother. As a result, Thomas Mann was able to ask the singer Hilde Distel (1880–1917) about the details of the murder in the tram in 1902 , which he then used decades later in Doctor Faustus ; also Thomas Mann's correspondence with her sister Lilly Dieckmann geb. This is how thistle finds its place.

literature

• Dagmar von Gersdorff : Julia Mann, the mother of Heinrich and Thomas Mann. A biography , Insel, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-458-17770-8 .
• Marianne Krüll: In the network of magicians - another story of the Mann family. S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2005, ISBN 3-10-042030-6 .
• Michael Stübbe: The Manns. Genealogy of a German family of writers . Self-published 2016, ISBN 978-3-00-052256-7 .

Web links

• Julia Mann at thomasmann.de
• Julia Mann at FemBio

Individual evidence

1. ^ Theodor Distel . ( Wikisource )