Thomas Mann House
[2] The Thomas Mann House is in the Riviera neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, a community in the Westside of Los Angeles.
While staying in the Brentwood neighborhood in the summer of 1940, Thomas and his Jewish wife Katia Mann decided to move to California.
That same year, they bought a 1.5 acres (0.61 ha)* in the neighboring community of Pacific Palisades, which was part of a lemon plantation.
The construction was made possible by Mann's profitable honorary post as "Consultant in Germanic Literature" at the Library of Congress – an appointment that he had received in 1941 thanks to his long-term correspondent and sponsor Agnes E. Meyer – as well as by his lucrative lecture tours.
[16] Thomas Mann wrote some of this most important works while living at the house, including his novel Doctor Faustus, large parts of the fourth volume of his tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers, and numerous political speeches and writings expressing his opposition to the German National Socialist regime, including most of his radio broadcasts Deutsche Hörer!
Disappointed by American post-war politics and McCarthyism, Thomas and Katia Mann, together with their daughter Erika, left the house in July 1952 and returned to Switzerland where they had previously lived in exile between 1933 and 1938.
[17] Living in Erlenbach, Switzerland, under cramped circumstances, complaining that the study would not even accommodate a sofa, he wrote to Agnes E. Meyer in September 1953 that he missed his Californian house.
In July 2018, the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported about behind-the-scenes trouble in connection with the house and the academic program.
Since the opening of the house in June 2018, a variety of programs have been developed first under program director Nikolai Blaumer, since 2022 under Blaumer's successor Benno Herz: conferences, readings, concerts, and discussion events that, based on the Fellows' research projects, are held in cooperation with various partner institutions in the United States and in Germany.
[32] The 2019 program included a multi-day conference entitled Moral Code – Ethics in the Digital Age, which took place at the University of California, Los Angeles.
[33] Fellow Damian Borth joined American scholars for a discussion about new ways of communicating and the ethical implications of the use of digital technologies.
[34][35] This series of lectures is inspired by the 55 BBC radio broadcasts that Thomas Mann recorded at the house during the Second World War for listeners in Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, the occupied Netherlands and Czechoslovakia.
Renowned international intellectuals, scholars, and artists will broadcast talks from the Thomas Mann House, presenting their ideas for the revival of democracy.
Contributors include political scientist Francis Fukuyama, sociologists Ananya Roy, Andreas Reckwitz, and Jutta Allmendinger, German literary scholar Jan Philipp Reemtsma, the American writer Alexandra Kleeman, the political scientist Jan-Werner Müller, as well as the historians Timothy Snyder.
Participants of the communal reading of Thomas Mann's novella Mario and the Magician included well-known journalists, writers, and scholars.
