Nelly man

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Heinrich Mann's grave with a memorial plaque for his wife Nelly in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof in Berlin

Nelly Mann (born Emmy Johanna Westphal, also Nelly Kröger ; * February 15, 1898 in Ahrensbök ; † December 17, 1944 in Los Angeles ) came from the simplest of social backgrounds and, through her connection with the writer Heinrich Mann, became part of the class-conscious family around the Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann . She failed in her struggle for self-assertion and recognition in this upper-class, intellectual environment.

origin

In front of the registrar in Ahrensbök near Lübeck , then part of the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg , today part of the Ostholstein district, a midwife stated “that a child of the female sex was born on February 15, 1898 by the unmarried maid Bertha Margaretha Elise Westphal, Protestant religion which was given the first name Emmy Johanna. ”For a long time, the cattle dealer Noah Troplowitz, who had moved from Upper Silesia , was considered the likely father ; a more recent biography suggests that the father was a country postman who delivered mail to Ahrensbök and the surrounding area. There are indications for both assumptions, but no evidence can be found. After graduating from primary school and doing an apprenticeship as a seamstress, the girl Emmy took on the more contemporary nickname Nelly. Her mother moved to Niendorf an der Lübeck Bay to marry the fisherman Nicolaus Wilhelm Heinrich Kröger. As a result, Nelly had four half-siblings in addition to her sister. On December 30, 1920, she was named in a civil declaration , that is: Kröger declared that his wife's daughter could bear his name. This was not an adoption in the legal sense. Since then, the name Kröger has been mentioned often, but inappropriately, as Nelly's maiden name.

live in Berlin

Soon after, Nelly left Niendorf for Berlin. She found a place to sleep on Invalidenstrasse and work in one of the numerous clothing workshops in the east of the city. Then she rented a furnished room in the middle-class district of Charlottenburg , Kantstrasse 156 opposite the Tanzpalast Delphi - this is how her half-brother Walter remembers, who visited her in Berlin, to whom she also showed the city's working- class neighborhoods and explained her left-wing political views. In 1925 she married a dubious young banker named Werner Schmidt; an unwanted child was likely given away or died, the marriage was quickly divorced; this episode is also inadequately documented. A friend persuaded Nelly to work as an animation lady in a bar - it is uncertain whether it was the Bajadere in Kleiststrasse or the Kakadu in Joachimstaler Strasse. As an attractive figure - tall, blonde and full figured - she was quite successful in her new job.

In 1929 a close relationship developed with a regular bar-goer, a considerably older gentleman of almost 60 years. Heinrich Mann moved to Berlin in 1928 after separating from his wife Maria Kanová, a Czech actress; In 1930 the marriage was divorced. He lived not far from Nelly's place of work: Uhlandstrasse 126, an upper-class residential area. As a writer, he had long been widely recognized and commercially successful, for example through the novel Der Untertan from 1914. The worldwide celebrated film The Blue Angel with Marlene Dietrich was based on an earlier work by Heinrich Mann, the novel Professor Unrat from 1904 and was premiered in 1930. In 1931 the author was appointed President of the Poetry Section of the Prussian Academy of the Arts . The conservative poet and essayist Gottfried Benn praised him ("the master who created us all"), the left-wing journal Die Weltbühne even suggested that he be elected President in April 1932 . Despite the stark social differences, there were some things in common between Nelly Kröger and Heinrich Mann: both came from Lübeck or its surroundings, both had similar political convictions, and both apparently found each other's strange milieu very attractive.

Nelly had a lover that Heinrich Mann also knew about - a classic triangular relationship developed. Rudi Carius was a communist ; As a well-known, active KPD comrade and resolute opponent of the National Socialists , he was wanted and soon after they came to power on January 30, 1933 , he had to go into hiding.

Heinrich Mann, too, had to feel threatened. In February 1933 a poster appeared on advertising pillars with the urgent appeal to form a unit of action between the SPD and KPD against the NSDAP , signed by Heinrich Mann, Käthe Kollwitz , Albert Einstein and others; the same appeal had already been published before the Reichstag election in July 1932 - in both cases, as is well known, unsuccessful. On February 21, Heinrich Mann fled Berlin and Germany, traveled to Sanary-sur-Mer on the French Mediterranean coast - a temporary refuge for a number of emigrated German and Austrian intellectuals - and on to Nice .

emigration

South France

Nelly initially stayed in Berlin and met several times in secret with Rudi Carius, who had gone into hiding in the city. Eventually they both agreed to flee together and, with the help of Nelly's stepfather Kröger, got from Sassnitz to Denmark and from there via Le Havre to Nice. Nelly lived with Heinrich Mann in his apartment on the Promenade des Anglais . Carius was staying in a small hotel nearby, and later took on the part of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War against Franco in part. He was then interned in a French camp, extradited to Nazi Germany and imprisoned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp until 1945 . After the liberation he lived in the GDR, where he died in 1971. Among German emigrants in Nice - the meeting point was the Café Monnod on the Place Masséna - Nelly was not treated as an unequal lover of an important author, but valued above all as a good storyteller, recalled the writer Hermann Kesten . His mother said: “This Nelly is a brave girl with a sense of goodness. It started wrong, and it may end wrong, too, but in between it is dead right; whoever wins such a man must be very lovable or love very hard. "

In Nice, Heinrich Mann still had enough money for a comfortable life. He wrote the two volumes on the youth and perfection of the king "Henri Quatre" , one of his main works, and was involved in numerous publications for the struggle of all democratic forces against fascism . In addition, he cultivated contacts with other emigrants, including the family of his brother Thomas, who behaved insultingly and negatively towards Nelly (Thomas Mann referred to her as “the terrible Trulle” and “a bad whore”, his wife Katia only called her “the play "). With all this, he found little time for Nelly. She started drinking and made two suicide attempts. On September 9, 1939, eight days after the start of the Second World War , a French registrar in Nice certified the marriage of Heinrich Mann - expatriated from Germany in 1933, but a Czechoslovak citizen since 1936, like his brother Thomas - with Emmy Johanna Kröger, stateless and unemployed.

France was defeated in June 1940 . The northern half of the country was occupied by the German Wehrmacht , while southern France was under the administration of the Vichy government , which collaborated with the occupation regime. The situation became threatening for the German emigrants. On September 12, 1940, the three couples Franz and Alma Werfel , Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger as well as Heinrich and Nelly Mann and Golo Mann , Thomas' son, set out to flee across the Pyrenees . Varian Fry , an American aide from the Emergency Rescue Committee , accompanied them. Via Perpignan it went to the Spanish-French border town of Cerbère , then laboriously over steep footpaths to Spain. Heinrich Mann, now 69 years old, had to be supported by Nelly; Looking back, he said that he would not have made it without her help. The next stops were Madrid and Lisbon , from there the journey took one of the last available ship passages to New York City and from there to Hollywood .

California

In the film studios Heinrich Mann, like other emigrated authors (e.g. Feuchtwanger, Friedrich Torberg and Alfred Döblin ), was given a year-long, poorly paid job as a script writer due to the advocacy of American supporters , for which, however, no de facto consideration was expected. He wrote not for sale and soon found himself in material and psychological difficulties. He was financially supported by his far more successful brother Thomas. Like the whole Mann family , Nelly continued to be condescending and advised Heinrich to separate quickly. In the meantime, Nelly was typing off manuscripts, got into personal quarrels, and was publicly denounced as an alcoholic and supporter of National Socialism. Katia Mann could have helped her, but didn't. In 1941 Nelly found: "Now we are at the freezing point" - Thomas Mann's house is to blame for everything. She contributed as much as possible to the common livelihood and worked in a clinic, probably as a night nurse, according to another source as a dishwasher. Under the burden of financial problems, concern for her decrepit husband, and rejection from her family, she developed paranoid traits. After a rather harmless traffic offense under the influence of alcohol, a court hearing threatened; she attempted suicide again and was subsequently admitted to a psychiatric hospital .

On January 30, 1944, she wrote from the hospital:

"Dear Heinrich, remember when you were sick ... I didn't put you in an institution either ... I can't think of what I've suffered for the last two years, and only because, in my deepest humiliation, I served a glass of wine Having drank a lot and been drunk often, I haven't completely lost my mind. Now I want to live! It is entirely up to you that we settle this matter with kindness and without causing further ado. Otherwise you will force me to do something that you will definitely ... feel sorry for. "

Almost a year later, on December 17, 1944, she committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills. "Unfortunately, you have to say, fortunately," commented Golo Mann on the event. Heinrich Mann reported in a letter to a friend: “She died in the ambulance… This last year was a shame and horror… People who don't know anything try to suggest to me that it is better that way… No. Returning to places where I had them and no longer bringing them with me? I hardly ever leave the apartment that was hers. ”He died five years later and they were both buried in the Santa Monica cemetery. In 1961 his urn alone was transferred to Berlin and buried in the Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof in Chausseestrasse. At the foot of a stele with the portrait sculpture of the writer, a small plaque, subsequently attached, reminds of “Nelly Mann, geb. Kröger ”; the correct maiden name is not mentioned here either.

Literary traces

Nelly's biography up to the meeting with Heinrich Mann is largely accurately reproduced in his novel A Serious Life from 1932, but without mentioning the illegitimate birth. Hermann Kesten remembered that Nelly told him in 1937 that she had written down her life at Heinrich Mann's insistence, that he had read the manuscript , praised it and then threw it into the fire: “Then… Heinrich sat down and wrote my entire book again . ”Heinrich Mann commented on this in December 1944, shortly after Nelly's death:“ A serious life is a work that is more or less the novel of my beloved deceased. ”Nelly Mann is also considered a role model for the literary figure of Gabrielle d'Estrées , the "lovely Gabrielle", mistress of King Henry IV in Heinrich Mann's novel Henri Quatre.

literature

  • Kirsten Jüngling : "I'm not just bad." Nelly Mann. The biography. Propylaea, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-549-07269-1 .
  • Joachim Seyppel : Farewell to Europe: The story of Heinrich and Nelly Mann, presented by Peter Aschenbach and Georgiewa Mühlenhaupt. Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin / Weimar 1979.
  • Stübbe, Michael: The Manns. Genealogy of a German family of writers . 2nd revised edition, self-published 2016, ISBN 978-3-00-052256-7

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ a b c Berliner Zeitung : The family's black sheep , June 14, 2014
  2. ↑ Calendar sheet in Bavaria 2 : Nelly Kroeger and Heinrich Mann flee for their lives ( memento of August 24, 2003 in the Internet Archive ), September 12, 2002
  3. ↑ Biography of Nelly Mann-Kröger on FemBio
personal data
SURNAME Man, Nelly
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Westphal, Emmy Johanna; Kroger, Nelly
BRIEF DESCRIPTION second wife of Heinrich Mann
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Ahrensbök
DATE OF DEATH December 17, 1944
Place of death los Angeles