NEWS | California
ON A QUEST TO PRESERVE DEMOCRACY Germany’s Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier Opened Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles
It is rare that a head of state makes a stop in Los Angeles but on June 18, 2018 this actually happened: No lesser than Germany’s Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier arrived in Los Angeles in order to officially inaugurate the recently renovated former residence of Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann. The Mann Family had fled Nazi Germany in 1933 to Switzerland and then to the U.S. in 1938 where they first lived in Princeton, New Jersey, and later in Southern California. The house on 1550 San Remo Drive, for which Mann commissioned architect Julius Ralph Davidson, became the home of the Mann family from 1942 to 1952. Davidson, born in Berlin in 1889 and a resident of Los Angeles since 1923, is considered one of the main representatives of “California Modernism”. Thomas Mann became a leading figure of exiled German intellectuals and his residence in Pacific Palisades, not far away from Martha and Lion Feuchtwanger’s Villa Aurora, a focus of German émigré life in Southern California”, a “place where intellect triumphed over barbarity” as Heinrich Wefing writes in Building Paradise: Exile Architecture in California. It was the house where Mann wrote “Doctor Faustus“, the third part of the Joseph trilogy, and his influential radio speeches “To the German Listeners“ (“Deutsche Hörer!”), which were broadcast by the BBC to Germany during the Second World War and formed an important counter message to the Nazi propaganda. When the house was put on the market for sale in 2016 and risked to be demolished, the Federal Foreign Office headed then by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, stepped in and purchased the house on behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany for 13 million US dollars in order to save such an important legacy of German exile culture. Mann expert Tilman Lahme called it an “auspicious moment for German cultural foreign policy.” Under the auspices of Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V., the Thomas Mann House is now home to a residency program and debate venue of German intellectuals offering them – in the spirit of Thomas Mann - an opportunity to engage in an exchange about topics that pose major challenges on both sides of the Atlantic. After a thorough 18-month-restoration of the historical building that came at a cost of another 5 million US dollars and is still not completely finished, Steinmeier had come to see the results, accompanied by his wife Elke Büdenbender and a delegation of Thomas Mann fellows and supporters. The building‘s structure has been maintained, but the interior was completely changed. The only room that
President Steinmeier, his wife Elke Büdenbender, Fridolin Mann, Dr. Klimmer (f.l.t.r.)
12 | HEIMAT abroad | SUMMER 2018
President Steinmeier duirng his opening address dubbing the TMH “The Oval Office of the Exile“
