Monika Mann

She was born in Munich, Germany, the fourth of six children of the Nobel Prize–winning author Thomas Mann and Katia, née Katharina Pringsheim.

Thomas Mann was already well established as a novelist and short story writer at the time of Monika's birth, although his Nobel Prize came many years later.

A year after Monika's birth her mother was ill with a lung complaint and was one of the first patients to be admitted to the Wald Sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland.

after a three week stay here (in the parental home) she is still the same old dull quaint Mönle (her nickname in the family), pilfering from the larder .

[7] After boarding school at Schule Schloss Salem she trained as a pianist in Lausanne and spent her young years in Paris, Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin.

[1] In 1934 she studied music and history of art in Florence, taking private piano tuition from the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola.

[7] In Florence she met the Hungarian art historian Jenő Lányi and in 1938 the couple left Italy for London, where they married on 2 March 1939.

They left for Canada in 1940 on the SS City of Benares, carrying 90 child evacuees, their ten escorts, 91 paying passengers (including 10 children), and 215 crew.

As the lifeboat began to lower, the blocks slid out of place, and the stern end of the boat fell, flinging more than two thirds of the roughly sixty people into the sea.

She reached New York on 28 October 1940 on the troopship Cameronia, and joined her parents, who had moved to the US in 1939, at the outbreak of World War II.

During this period she wrote five books and contributed regular feature pages to Swiss, German and Italian newspapers and magazines.

She spent her last years at Leverkusen, North Rhine-Westphalia, in the care of Ingrid Beck-Mann, the widow of her brother Golo's adopted son, and died on 17 March 1992.