[1] She is a Randfigur (peripheral person) whose importance lies in her relationships to major figures: a muse who inspired the composer Alban Berg, as well as Werfel and the Nobel Prize-winning writer Elias Canetti.

[2] Manon Gropius, christened in a Lutheran church as Alma Manon Anna Justina Carolina,[3] was born in Vienna during the height of World War I, on 5 October 1916, the third child of Alma Mahler, the widow of the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, and wife of the architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius.

[2] Her early life was spent traveling with her mother between Alma's three homes in Vienna, Breitenstein am Semmering, and Venice, as well as at Weimar, the site of the first Bauhaus school.

[6] During the early 1920s, Walter Gropius gave Alma the legal grounds to divorce him for infidelity, by arranging to be discovered in flagrante delicto with a prostitute.

[7] But her irascible behavior, owing much to her free-spirited early childhood—Alma let her go about naked ("stripped") as much as possible—led Manon to eventually leave the school, and her education continued at home.

[6] Werfel—who had married her mother in 1929 and no longer needed to be called by the euphemism "Onkel"—being well-versed in comparative religion, noticed the Potnia Theron-like associations as well as the attributes of a Christian saint such as St. Francis of Assisi.

[1] It was during this time that Elias Canetti saw her and, like the composer Ernst Krenek and others in Alma's circle, wrote about his impressions of Manon in his memoirs.

Canetti suggests Alma looked upon Manon as just another trophy, on a par with her three husbands and many possessions: Hardly a moment later a gazelle came tripping into the room, a light-footed, brown-haired creature disguised as a young girl, untouched by the splendor into which she had been summoned, younger in her innocence than her probable sixteen years.

I jumped up, thinking to bar her entrance into this alcove of vice or at least to cut off her view of the poisoner on the wall, but Lucrezia, who never stopped playing her part, had irrepressibly taken the floor:"Beautiful, isn't she?

[1] Now she found that joy vicariously in matching Manon with an older man, the Austrofascist politician Anton Rintelen, who was later arrested for his role in the failed Nazi July Putsch of 1934.

She even wrote the famous Burgtheater actor Raoul Aslan a letter and a poem in which she expressed her desire to one day perform on the same stage.

[6] Alma also encouraged visitors, including a younger Austrofascist, a bureaucrat named Erich Cyhlar, to court Manon, in the hopes that pending nuptials would compel her to walk again.

[11] Werfel planned a novel about a fictional Catholic saint's life in late-17th-century Venice, Legends, with various subtitles: The Intercessoress of Animals, of Snakes, and of the Dead.

[2][7] Manon is also a minor character in Max Phillips's 2001 novel The Artist's Wife, based on Alma Mahler's life.

[12] Manon's half-sister, the sculptor Anna Mahler, produced a marker for her grave—a young woman holding an hourglass—but the Anschluss prevented it from being installed.