VYou can’t really see anything from the street. There is no sign that Thomas Mann lived here in the Riviera District of Pacific Palisades, west of Los Angeles and overlooking the ocean. Anyway, if you drive up the drive from Santa Monica, there’s no sign or old man bell at the gate of the property, just this famous house number: 1550 San Remo Drive.
It’s hot and slightly windy this morning. Down at Surfrider Beach they have been lying in the water with their boards for a long time. And up here, where one huge villa stands next to the other and the Hollywood actors Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn live right next door, the main concern seems to be discretion and as little publicity as possible. Standing in front of the house, you have to know the phone number of someone behind the fence if you want to get in: “I can’t find a bell.” – “I’ll get to the gate,” says Benno Herz’s voice.
Herz is program director and currently head of the fellow program at the Thomas Mann House, where the German writer spent ten years of his American exile with his family (1942–1952) and which the German government bought for around $13 million in November 2016, before the demolition preserved. The house is not a museum, not a memorial, and actually receives no visitors at all. It is a research center for scientists, artists and intellectuals who, supported by various foundations, can live and work here for a few months. Sometimes there are events for which you need an invitation, which those who receive one are very happy to accept, because such evenings are one of the rare opportunities to see the house from the inside – together with the illustrious neighbors who live around it. Some of them, Herz says, come very regularly.
Benno Herz studied theatre, film and media studies in Frankfurt before he came here, he is also the singer of the band Okta Logue and has parked his motorbike, which he uses to go to work from Los Angeles in the morning, at the entrance right next to his office. It’s very quiet on the property. There are currently no Fellows bathing in the pool, which is hard to understand given the heat and the beauty of the pool. They used to call the address “Seven Palms” because there were once seven palm trees on the property, some of which have survived. We enter the bright rooms, in which some things have been reconstructed as they were when the Manns lived here, interspersed with modernist elements. Even if the writer’s work area, which was originally designed as a separate wing as a retreat just for him, is now connected to the rest of the house.
With a suit on the beach, of course
Thomas Mann emigrated with his family in 1933, first to Switzerland and then to southern France, and was given a visiting professorship at Princeton University. During a summer stay in Brentwood in 1940, the desire to move to California arose. The Mann couple rented a home above the Santa Monica Canyon and hired a realtor to look for a property. First, says Benno Herz, as we walk through the garden, which offers a view of Los Angeles, the architect Richard Neutra was involved, but his “cubist glass box style”, as Mann called it in his diary, apparently appealed to him was fashionable. At the end of 1940 the order went to Julius Ralph Davidson. And the house became a meeting place for exiles and the artists living in the neighborhood. For musicians like Bruno Walter or Arnold Schönberg, for writers like Feuchtwanger, Döblin or Werfel, for philosophers like Max Horkheimer or Theodor Adorno.
Together with Nikolai Blaumer, who was program director here before him, Benno Herz has just published a book about these neighborhoods of exile: Thomas Mann’s Los Angeles – Stories from Exile 1940–1952 (Angel City Press). In each chapter, contributions explore the surrounding hilltop houses (with a map) and tell anecdotes about those who lived there and about their respective relationships with the Manns, which – if you think of Brecht – could also mean that you were unfortunately bad off could go the way. Numerous photos in the book also show the beach in Santa Monica in 1945, which appears much more crowded than it is today – and where the man only went for a walk in a white suit and shoes, of course.
“This is his study,” Herz says. A scientist walks by quietly and says “Hello”. “Are you allowed to work here as a Fellow?” – “Of course, yes.” The desk is not the original Mann desk, but the library behind it and on the side walls has been put back together roughly as it was. An old photo hangs in the hallway, with which you can compare the situation in the study. The floral sofa that Mann is said to have been sitting on during Susan Sontag’s famous visit, Herz says, is no longer there. But the Goethe edition. It is placed neatly at the back of the workplace. The desk faces the nearby Pacific Ocean. And just around the corner is the pool. Inconceivable on a hot day like this that you can work here.
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