Erika Julia Hedwig Gründgens - Hugh - Auden

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Mann

Erika Julia Hedwig Mann (November 9, 1905 – August 27, 1969) was a German actress and writer, the eldest daughter of novelist Thomas Mann and Katia Mann. Contents [show] [edit]Life

Erika Mann was born in Munich and was the first born daughter of the writer and later Nobel-prize winner Thomas Mann and his wife, Katia (née Pringsheim), the daughter of an intellectual German family of Jewish heritage. She was named after Katia Mann's brother Erik, who died early, Thomas Mann's sister Julia Mann, and her grandmother Hedwig Dohm. She was baptized as a Protestant, just as her mother had been. Thomas Mann expressed in a letter to his brother Heinrich Mann his disappointment about the birth of his first child: "It is a girl; a disappointment for me, as I want to admit between us, because I had greatly desired a son and will not stop to hold such a desire. [...] I feel a son is much more full of poetry [poesievoller], more than a sequel and restart for myself under new circumstances." [1] Nevertheless, he later candidly confessed in the notes of his diary, that he "preferred, of the six, the two oldest [Erika and Klaus] and little Elisabeth with a strange decisiveness" [2] In Erika he had a particular trust, which later showed itself in that she exercised a great influence on the important decisions of her father. [3] Her particular role was also known by her siblings, as her brother Golo Mann remembered: "Little Erika must salt the soup" .[4]This reference to the twelve-year-old Erika from the year 1917 was an often used phrase in the Mann family. After Erika's birth came that of her brother Klaus, with whom she was personally close her entire life – they went about "like twins," and Klaus Mann described their closeness as follows: "our solidarity was absolute and without reservation." [5]Eventually there were four young children in total, including Golo, Monika, Elisabeth, and Michael. The children grew up in Munich. On the mother's side the family belonged to the influential urban upper class, and the father came from a commercial family from Lübeck and already had published the successful novel Buddenbrooks in 1901. The Mann home was a gathering-place for intellectuals and artists, and Erika was hired for her first theater engagement before finishing her Abitur at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. [edit]School career and first theatrical experiences

Erika Mann (at the wheel) and Richard 'Ricky' Hallgarten (1905-1932;grandchild of Charles Hallgarten) in Berlin as winners to 10 000 km car race across Europe, 1931.JPG In 1914, the Mann family obtained their well-known villa on 1 Porschingerstraße in Bogenhausen, which in the family would come to be known as “Poschi.” From 1912 to 1914, Erika Mann attended a private school with her brother, joining for a year the Bogenhausener Volksschule, and from 1915 to 1920 she attended the Höhere Mädchenschule am St. Annaplatz. In May of 1921, she transferred to the Munich-based Luisengymnasium. Together with her brother Klaus Mann and befriended neighborhood children, which included Bruno Walter’s daughters, Gretel and Lotte Walter, as well as Ricki Hallgarten, the son of a Jewish intellectual family, Erika Mann founded an ambitious theater troupe, the “Laienbund Deutscher Mimiker.” While still students at the Munich Luisengymnasium she appeared after an engagement from Max Reinhardt on the stage of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin for the first time. The partially mischievous pranks that she undertook in the so-called “Herzogpark-Bande” with Klaus and befriended neighborhood children prompted her parents to send her and her brother Klaus to a progressive residential school, Bergschule Hochwaldhausen, which was located in Vogelsberg in Oberhessen. This period in Erika Mann’s schooling lasted from April to July of 1922; subsequently she returned to the Luisengymnasium. In 1924 she passed the Abitur, albeit with poor marks, and began her theatrical studies in Berlin that were again, because of her numerous engagements among others in Hamburg, Munich, and Berlin, again interrupted. [edit]Acting and writing

In 1924, she began serious theater studies in Berlin and played in Berlin and Bremen. In 1925, she played in the premier of her brother Klaus' play Anja und Esther. On July 24, 1926, she married German actor Gustaf Gründgens, but they divorced in 1929. In 1927, she and Klaus undertook a trip around the world, which they documented in their book Rundherum; Das Abenteuer einer Weltreise. The following year, she began to be active in journalism and in politics. She was involved as an actor in the lesbian film Mädchen in Uniform (1931, Leontine Sagan) but left the production before its completion. In 1932 she published the first of many children's books. Shortly thereafter she became involved in several lesbian affairs in her private life. Her first noted affair was with actress Pamela Wedekind, whom she met in Berlin, and was engaged with her brother Klaus. She later became involved with director Therese Giehse, and journalists Betty Cox and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, whom she served with as a war correspondent during World War II. As was later written, her relationships were both sexually passionate and intellectually stimulating. In 1933, she, Klaus, and Therese Giehse had founded a cabaret in Munich called Die Pfeffermühle, for which Erika wrote most of the material, much of which was anti-Fascist. Erika was the last member of the Mann family to leave Germany after the Nazi regime was elected. She saved many of Thomas Mann's papers from their Munich home when she escaped to Zurich. In 1936, Die Pfeffermühle opened again in Zurich and became a rallying point for the exiles. In 1935 she undertook a marriage of convenience to the bisexual English poet W. H. Auden, in order to obtain British citizenship. She and Auden never lived together, but remained friends and technically married until Erika's death. In 1937, she crossed over to New York, where Die Pfeffermühle (as The Peppermill) opened its doors again. They lived (with Therese Giehse and her brother Klaus Mann and Miró) in a large group of artists in exile with people like Kurt Weill, Ernst Toller, Sonja Sekula ... In 1938, she and Klaus reported on the Spanish Civil War, and her book School for Barbarians about Nazi Germany's educational system was published. The following year, they published Escape to Life, a book about famous German exiles. During the war, she was active as a journalist in England. After World War II, Mann was one of the few women who covered the Nuremberg Trials. Following the war, both Klaus and Erika came under an FBI investigation into their political views and rumored homosexuality. In 1949, becoming increasingly depressed and disillusioned over post-war torn Germany, Klaus Mann committed suicide. This event devastated Erika Mann.[6] In 1952, she moved back to Switzerland with her parents. She had begun to help her father with his writing and had become one of his closest confidantes. She became responsible for his works and the works of her brother Klaus after death and worked on them intensely. She died in Zürich. [edit]Biographical films

Escape to Life: The Erika & Klaus Mann Story (2001) [edit]Works

School for Barbarians: Education Under the Nazis (1938) Escape to life (1939) The lights go down (1940) The Other Germany (with Klaus Mann, 1940) The Last Year of Thomas Mann. A Revealing Memoir by His Daughter, Erika Mann (1958) [edit]See also

Dohm-Mann family tree [edit]References

^ Thomas Mann/Heinrich Mann: Briefwechsel 1900–1949, S. 109 ^ Thomas Mann: Tagebücher 1918–1921, Eintrag vom 10. März 1920 ^ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Thomas Mann und die Seinen, S. 184 ^ Golo Mann: Meine Schwester Erika. In Erika Mann, Briefe II, S. 241 ^ Klaus Mann: Der Wendepunkt, S. 102 ^ glbtq >> arts >> Mann, Erika [edit]Further reading

Martin Mauthner: German Writers in French Exile, 1933-1940, Vallentine Mitchell, London, 2007, (ISBN : 978 0 85303 540 4).

• Updated from MyHeritage Family Trees by SmartCopy: Oct 18 2015, 20:20:39 UTC