Monika Mann

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Monika Mann (born June 7, 1910 in Munich , † March 17, 1992 in Leverkusen ) was a German writer .

Life

Monika Mann (first from left) with her siblings (from left to right: Golo , Michael , Klaus , Elisabeth and Erika ) and her mother Katia , 1919.

The daughter of Katia and Thomas Mann is one of the unloved children of the Mann family , along with Golo and Michael . Thomas Mann frankly admitted in his diary that he “of the sixes prefer three, the two elders ( Klaus and Erika ) and Elisabethchen , with a strange determination.” And her mother wrote in 1939 about Monika to her son Klaus: “I am determined not to say any more unkind word about her in my life and to behave nice and helpful. "In her family's notes and letters, she was often described as strange and strange:" She is here (at her parents' house) after three weeks, but quite the old, dull, strange Mönle, completely idle, maneuvering the pantry ”. Within the family, Monika Mann was called "Mönle".

After attending school, most recently in Salem not far from Lake Constance, she trained as a pianist in Lausanne and studied music and art history in Florence . She and her family emigrated to Switzerland via France in 1933 . In 1934 she completed private piano studies in Florence with the composer Luigi Dallapiccola . There she met her future husband, the Hungarian-Jewish art historian Jenö Lányi (1902–1940). In 1938 the couple left Italy for London , where they married in March 1939. After the Wehrmacht bombed London, the Lányis decided to emigrate . During the crossing from Liverpool to Canada in September 1940 with the British ship City of Benares , this was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank. Her husband drowned while Monika Mann survived the accident. According to her own statement, she heard him call her three more times. She herself drifted in a lifeboat in the ocean for 20 hours until an English warship picked up the few survivors and brought them to Scotland . After another voyage on the Cameronia , she reached the port of New York City on October 28, 1940 , where she was expected by her parents. She spent the next few years in the United States with her family and then moved to New York City alone in 1942. From 1944 to 1945 she shared an apartment with Kadidja Wedekind with interruptions .

In 1947 she began to professionalize her writing, to the displeasure of Thomas Mann, who did not believe in her talent as a writer. And Katia Mann said in another letter to Klaus in 1949: “You can't take this last lie of life from her, but on the other hand, if she insists on it and publishes her semi-talented, tasteless, off-the-shelf products with the help of her name, which is quite conceivable, so it's not right for you either. ”In this devastating judgment, which Katia Mann changed into“ peculiar literary talent ”in the mid-1950s, the concern that internal family matters might become public played a part. They probably also disliked the sometimes disrespectful tone in which Monika spoke about her relatives, for example she said in an interview that her brother Michael had "unfortunately drunk himself to death" and her sister Elisabeth Mann Borgese was throwing "all of her money into the ocean ".

In 1948 Monika Mann suffered a psychological crisis and was brought to the Ananda Ashram in La Crescenta near Los Angeles by her sister-in-law Gret Moser at the instigation of her parents , where she only lived for a few days until she found refuge with friends.

Monika Mann received American citizenship in June 1952 , but returned to Europe in September and, after spending several months in Bordighera, lived in Rome . In 1955 she wrote the autobiography Past and Present , in which she actually expressed herself critical of Thomas Mann in particular. Her father died during the recordings; she marked this point with a † in the manuscript. “My father's death is still too close to me to want to say much about him. Just one thing - his presence was strong. His absence was severe. But his absence is full of presence. And wasn't his presence full of absence? ”The book was published in 1956 at the same time as Erika Mann's The Last Year. Report published about my father . Both books were positively discussed in the October issue of Merkur magazine , with Monika Mann's book "making a personal claim". Katia Mann then let the reviewer know: “Future literary historians should not consider the little book as a source work”. In her opinion it was “offensive” and was “decidedly inadmissible” to Thomas Mann, moreover “of all six children she was the most distant from him”, and Erika Mann, who had made it her business after her father's death, about the literary To watch the respect of her family, said: “And the breathlessness with which two of TM's daughters try to benefit from this death - they too will be commented on. The reading, of course, would have to show who was legitimized here. ”In making this assessment, however, both disregarded the fact that it was an autobiographical work, that is, reflects the author's point of view, which rules out a purely factual presentation of the father.

From the end of 1954 Monika Mann lived for many years on Capri in Italy with the fisherman Antonio Spadaro, to whom she also dedicated her book. In addition to the past and present , she wrote several other books, otherwise she mostly wrote short texts similar to poems; one of the most famous is The Father . In 1958 she again took on German citizenship.

In 1986, after the death of her partner on December 13, 1985, she had to leave his house, the Villa Monacone . She had already announced earlier that in this case she would move to her brother Golo Mann's former parents' house in Kilchberg , and had therefore always refused to sell him her share in the house. Golo had always feared his sister's move in and the mentally unstable siblings didn’t live together, so Monika moved to Zurich. "When I realized that it didn't work, I just left again," she commented on her move.

At the end of the 1980s, she was accepted into the house of Ingrid Beck-Mann, the widow of Golo Mann's adopted son, Hans Beck-Mann, in Leverkusen, where she also died. Monika Mann was buried in the family grave in Kilchberg.

Works (selection)

  • Past and present. Memories. Kindler, Munich 1956; Rowohlt, Reinbek 2001, ISBN 3-499-23087-9 .
  • The start. A diary. Steinklopfer-Verlag, Fürstenfeldbruck 1960
  • Dab in space . Hegner, Cologne / Olten 1963
  • Childhood miracles. Pictures and impressions. Hegner, Cologne / Olten 1966
  • The last prisoner. A true legend in onore of a (last) composer. Lemke, Lohhof 1967
  • The moving house. From the life of a world citizen. Ed. And with an afterword by Karin Andert. Rowohlt, Reinbek 2007, ISBN 978-3-49924513-8 (interviews, texts and letters)

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Entry from March 10, 1920
  2. ^ Letter of August 29, 1939
  3. ^ Letter from Katia Mann to Klaus Mann dated August 29, 1939
  4. ^ Letter of November 11, 1948
  5. ↑ Monika Mann: Past and Present
  6. ^ Letter from Katia Mann to Hillard-Steinbömer of November 25, 1956
  7. ↑ Uwe Naumann (Ed.): The children of the Manns. P. 248
  8. ↑ Bayerischer Rundfunk: Monika Mann: The island of second happiness | BR.de. In: www.br.de. November 3, 2011, accessed May 29, 2016 .
  9. ↑ Urs Bitterli: Golo Mann. Instance and outsider, p. 502.


personal data
SURNAME Man, Monika
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 7, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH March 17, 1992
Place of death Leverkusen