A German émigré’s paradise: Thomas Mann in California
Thomas Mann, the greatest modern German writer, went into exile from Nazi Germany in 1933. He lost almost all his money and possessions, and lived in France, Switzerland and Princeton, New Jersey. In the spring of 1941 he moved from the East Coast to the milder climate of Los Angeles and joined the large colony of distinguished European émigrés. While searching for an architect to design his new house, he was rudely pressured at a party by the eminent Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra. The dignified Mann lost his temper and told his host: “Get that Neutra off my back!”
In May 1941, when Hitler had conquered most of Europe, Mann described his doubts and decisions to his Princeton friend Erich Kahler: “Our plans for building have been subject to many vacillations — not only the plans, but even the very intention to build. We were the ones who vacillated, which is understandable in these times, and given the uncertainty of the future. At one point we had definitely decided not to build, to pay off the architect and withdraw. But now it seems after all as if we will begin again and from the autumn on live under our own — that is, under the Federal Loan’s — roof. The thing appears more risky than it is. Rents will rise and the site is so beautiful that we can rent or sell at any time.”
After interviewing several candidates Mann finally chose Julius Davidson (1889-1977). Born in Berlin, he trained in London and Paris and served in World War I. He came to Los Angeles in 1924, worked as a Hollywood set designer, then planned shops, restaurants and hotels. He also created clear, functional, well-planned homes with flat rooftops and wide front windows. Mann, who’d rented houses from 1933 to 1941 during his nomadic life in Europe and America, bought land and agreed to build his home in June 1941. Two weeks after the Nazis invaded Russia, he confidently declared, “I will become a real Californian now.”
Mann took an active part in planning the design of his long white two-story residence, which had high glass windows and a balcony on the second floor. In October 1941, two months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he wrote to Agnes Meyer, his wealthy American patron, about the difficulties of building during the threat of war: “The house is making slow progress; the steel window and door casings were very long in arriving, and sometimes labor is short.” The 66-year-old Mann financed his costly house and living expenses with arduous and exhausting annual five-week lecture tours, ranging from Midwestern high schools to a crowd of 18,000 in Madison Square Garden in New York. He constantly worried about money, but spent $1,100 on his lavish semi-tropical garden.
The house at 1550 San Remo Drive in Pacific Palisades, a posh district where all the streets were named for towns on the Italian Riviera, was in the hills above Sunset Boulevard and its site had once been part of a lemon plantation. Built on 1.5 acres between June 1941 and February 1942 for $26,000, the elongated space of 4,300 square feet had twenty rooms and a double garage. In her memoir, Mann’s wife Katia recalled, “The location was beautiful, with a magnificent view of the sea and of Catalina Island, and with palm, orange and lemon trees on a large plot.” Mann enthusiastically agreed and told the German novelist Hermann Hesse, “The site is lovely, with a view of the Pacific and the [Santa Monica] mountains; there are lots of lemon trees and seven palms, for which reason we are thinking of calling it the Seven Palms House.”
In Building Paradise: Exile Architecture in California (2004), Heinrich Wefing gives a precise description of the impressive house:
The ground plan is organised as a linear sequence of larger and smaller rooms, ranging from the profane to the inner sanctum, from the garage on the west to Mann’s study on the southeast. The visitor enters the estate from San Remo Drive, where a broad driveway leads between flowerbeds to a forecourt with access to the garage. To the left, past the north façade, one comes to the main entrance, which opens into a hall that doubles as a stairwell and gives on to the living room, the spatial midpoint of the house. A fireplace on the north wall and a large expanse of windows overlooking the curving south patio lend the living room both comfort and a bit of grandeur. Located to the west are the dining room and, behind it, the kitchen and a range of utility rooms. The upper floor contains three bathrooms and a total of five bedrooms, one each for Katia and Thomas Mann and three for their six children and grandchildren.
This grand house, on the cliffs overlooking the ocean, matched Mann’s expectations. He liked California and found the “hilly landscape strikingly similar to Tuscany. I have what I wanted — the light; the dry, always refreshing warmth; the spaciousness compared with Princeton.” But only ten months later he became slightly disenchanted with his new paradise. Comparing the Technicolor foliage to the more subtle display of autumnal hues in Switzerland and on the East Coast, he said, “I liked it better in Küsnacht [near Zurich] and even in Princeton. Here everything blooms in violet and grape colours that look rather made of paper.”
Still, California had many advantages. He remarked, “Perhaps the sunniness and vividness of this region, this easy living and somewhat slack oversized seaside resort, is helpful. The strange oceanic desert climate here still often tires me, but at the same time sharpens the appetite.” After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he boasted of the semi-tropical winters, rather like the south of France, as he walked beneath the swaying palm trees and gazed at the azure Pacific where great naval battles would be fought at the Coral Sea and Midway: “I went walking without an overcoat on my favourite promenade above the ocean, sat a long while on a bench in the sun — it is bearable at this season — and looked dreamily out at the blue theatre of war.”
In a delightful letter to Hesse in March 1942, Mann praised the pristine view, the Edenic garden, the clear light and the balmy climate: “I am working under outward conditions for which I cannot be grateful enough — in the most beautiful work room I have ever had. I wish you could see the country around our house and the view of the ocean; the garden with its palm, olive, pepper, lemon and eucalyptus trees, the luxuriant flowers, the grass plots, which were being mowed a few days after the seed was sown. Bright sensory impressions are not to be sneezed at in such times; the sky is bright almost all year long and sheds an incomparable, all beautifying light.”
Mann hired as his interior decorator Paul Huldschinsky, son of a once-wealthy Berlin coal magnate and currently working as a Hollywood set designer. When Mann said he couldn’t afford the fees, Huldschinsky offered to work to cover expenses and to enhance his reputation by decorating Mann’s house. While it was being built, Mann and Katia drove around Los Angeles with the decorator to choose furniture, wallpaper, curtains and carpets. The outside of the house was California modern, the deliberately old-fashioned and gemütlich interior recreated what had been abandoned in Europe.
Mann finally moved into the new residence in February 1942. His square study — attached to the far end of the house, away from the main rooms, visitors and noise — had views of the fruit groves, descending hills and distant ocean. Ironically thanking the dictator who had driven him out of Germany, he told Kahler, “I shall, Heil Hitler, have the finest study I have ever worked in.” He was especially pleased to recover his desk, the symbolic connection to his lost world. It had been sent from Munich before the war, followed him to Switzerland and Princeton, and ended up improbably in southern California.
Once again he possessed his creative fetishes: the statue of the Siamese warrior stood between two lamps and the Chinese ashtray took its accustomed place. His daughter Erika described the sacred desk: “It is truly strange: here it now stands, and all the little things are arranged on it in the old way: the large ivory letter opener, the medallions and the photographs. The servant dusts them, and I asked him, in English, not to move anything.”
Mann’s purchased his most prized possession, Die Quelle (The Spring, 1914), painted in the Art Nouveau and Symbolist style by Ludwig von Hoffman (1861-1945), as soon as it was completed. Once displayed in Mann’s Munich study, it now held the place of honour above the living-room fireplace. Against a swirling, tree-filled deep blue background, three naked muscular dark-haired youths form a triangle, perched on bare white rocks. The first youth, seen sideways and with prominent buttocks, kneels and drinks from a gushing waterfall. The second, also seen sideways, leans forward to touch his bare foot resting on a rock. The third, leaning toward the viewer but with genitals hidden behind his leg, looks down on the thirsty youth. Excited by these homoerotic Grecian poses, in June 1914 Mann wrote to Hoffman that he “fell madly in love” with the painting, and was charmed by its youthful physicality and the “arcadian fantasy of beauty.”
The impressive new estate confirmed Mann’s position as the leading émigré author and satisfied what he called his North German “desire for a dignified and representative existence in a solid personal life.” With everything apparently settled, Mann adjusted to California and made his peace with exile, withdrew into himself and kept alive the flame of German culture: “Germany is cloaked in darkness… and I am alone. What does it matter that I am ‘far away’? Far away from what? Maybe from myself. Our centre is within us, Wherever we are, we are ‘at home.’ What is homelessness? My home is in the works that I bring with me. Absorbed in them, I experience all the coziness of being at home. They are language, German language and form of thought, the personally developed traditional ware of my country and my people… I am at home wherever the desk stands. Wherever I am, Germany is!”
Mann’s older brother Heinrich, who’d escaped Occupied France on foot through the Pyrenees, was not as fortunate as Thomas. He did not have an Anglo-sounding name, command of English, Nobel Prize, influential publisher, extensive readership, generous patrons, considerable wealth, and support of a wife and adult children. Dependent on Thomas, Heinrich lived miserably in a cramped Santa Monica apartment with his wife Nelly, a former prostitute, alcoholic and mentally unstable. In April 1942, when a temporary marital separation became essential, Heinrich moved into Seven Palms for several weeks and noted the painful contrast to his own wretched rooms. Two years later Nelly committed suicide.
In July 1944 Mann told a friend, “I do not think I shall give up the home I have built here by the Pacific, the home which I have come to love and which is so favourable for my work.” But once again, he became the victim of political convulsions. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts of the early 1950s, which falsely accused Mann of being a communist, embittered his life and reminded him of the persecutions in Nazi Germany. These accusations drove him out of America, and in June 1952 he returned to the harsher climate in Switzerland.
While teaching at UCLA in 1963, eleven years after Mann had left California, I looked up his address in an old phone book and presented myself at the door of 1550 San Remo Drive. Surprised and pleased that I had connected their home to the eminent author, the current owners — in friendly American fashion — invited me for a tour of the house and flourishing garden, and spectacular view of the Pacific. When I asked for a glimpse of Mann’s relics, they showed me a modest side table that still stood in the hallway and a poster he had left behind of the miraculous Black Madonna in Poland.
His biographer Nigel Hamilton observes that Mann owed America “more than any other émigré from Hitler’s Germany: his freedom, even his life, a new public, honours and the sunshine climate of California.” While living in Pacific Palisades he completed two major works: the last volume of his biblical tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1943) and his intellectual masterpiece and allegory of Nazi Germany, Doctor Faustus (1947). In 1952 Mann was 77 years old. He had become an American citizen and had miraculously recovered from a dangerous lung cancer operation. So it was a tremendous upheaval to leave his beloved house and continue his itinerant life.
Jeffrey Meyers, FRSL, has published 41 articles on Mann and the book Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (Northwestern UP, 2014)
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