Weighty information – additional signs for the Mann family

In addi­tion to the street signs with the names of the Mann-familiy from Munich, boards have been com­pleted that provide inform­a­tion about the mem­bers of the fam­ily and are placed below the signs.
Addi­tion­al inform­a­tion is there­fore an integ­ral part of the monu­ment.
The texts were cre­ated in col­lab­or­a­tion with the Cul­tur­al Depart­ment of the City of Munich, Pub­lic His­tory Depart­ment. They provide brief bio­graph­ies of Thomas, Katia, Klaus, Erika, Golo Mann and Elisa­beth Mann. The Munich build­ing depart­ment took over the tech­nic­al imple­ment­a­tion. Until now, these signs were only avail­able for Thomas, Klaus and Erika Mann. In this respect, it made sense to me to provide all Munich street names with such signs and to add ones for Katia, Golo and Elisa­beth Mann.
The signs are made of enamelled met­al and are there­fore quite heavy com­pared to their size (15 x 45 cm). Reas­on to place the signs on a bath­room scale – and test the weight of the names and information.

From São Paulo to Munich – Rua Thomas Mann

After a long jour­ney, in Octo­ber 2023 the last of the signes arrived that will be part of the monu­ment to the Mann fam­ily. It came from Brasil: a copy of the sign of Rua Thomas Mann in São Paulo. CSV Sin­al­iz­a­ção in Campina/São Paulo pro­duced it in close col­lab­or­a­tion with Albert Coers. As it arrived, covered with stick­ers and stamps of cus­toms, mail, deliv­ery, it is an object of Mail Art, too. 

Pacific Palisades – Light, Shadow, and Fire

In 1941, Katia and Thomas Mann moved from Prin­ceton to the West Coast, to Los Angeles – the decis­ive factor being the pro­spect of being able to live in a villa they had built them­selves and no longer ren­ted, thus leav­ing behind their emig­rant status and put­ting down roots in the USA. Added to this are the land­scape and the weath­er: „The sky is bright here almost all year round and sends out an incom­par­able, all-beau­ti­fy­ing light“ (TM to Her­mann Hesse).

Haus Thomas Manns, ca. 1942; Design & Archi­tec­ture Museum; Uni­ver­sity of Cali­for­nia, Santa Barbara

LA – a bleak picture?

But in autum 2019, when I planned vis­it­ing Thomas Manns home, I had been warned by a driver I was trav­el­ling with on the East Coast, in Maine: „You may give going to LA some ser­i­ous thought. Things there are pretty tough.“

And Georg Bloch­mann, dir­ect­or of the Goethe-Insti­tut in New York, also paints a bleak pic­ture: LA is a sym­bol of the fail­ure of the Amer­ic­an Dream, with extreme social segreg­a­tion and the dys­func­tion­al­ity of pub­lic infra­struc­ture, includ­ing pub­lic transport.

The stay will be about con­trasts. In the social aspect, between pub­lic and private, the light of the met­ro­pol­is and its dark sides.

In this respect, I am inter­ested in pub­lic trans­port and how it can be used to get to Thomas Mann’s former home in this car-dom­in­ated city – even though he nev­er took the bus in LA, but always drove his own car (he did not have a driv­ing licence, unlike Katia and his chil­dren, of whom Erika and Elisa­beth in par­tic­u­lar were pas­sion­ate drivers, prob­ably a ter­rain of the female Manns).

It all takes quite a long time, but works sur­pris­ingly well over­all. Once again, it takes an hour and a half, which is already typ­ic­al for oth­er cit­ies, to get from the city centre to the des­tin­a­tion asso­ci­ated with the Manns. It’s off to Pacific Pal­is­ades, on the hilly west­ern edge of the met­ro­pol­is. This time there are no prob­lem neigh­bour­hoods or com­muter sub­urbs on the peri­phery, but vil­las. By bus towards Santa Mon­ica and Beverly Hills, then anoth­er in Westwood;

Get off at the Sunset/Capri stop, up San Remo Drive. Even the name „Drive“ indic­ates that you nor­mally get around here by (car). Lush gar­dens, palm trees, sweep­ing and mow­ing, mostly by His­pan­ics or blacks. After sev­er­al turns, a place that looks famil­i­ar to me from my vir­tu­al tours via Google Earth, where high hedges and trees form a wall-like corner, behind which the house lies like Sleep­ing Beauty. Here again the need for pri­vacy seems to mani­fest itself; and time has done the rest.

San Remo Drive

Get off at the Sunset/Capri stop, up San Remo Drive. Even the name „Drive“ indic­ates that you nor­mally get around here by (car). Lush gar­dens, palm trees, sweep­ing and mow­ing, mostly by His­pan­ics or blacks. After sev­er­al turns, a place that looks famil­i­ar to me from my vir­tu­al tours via Google Earth, where high hedges and trees form a wall-like corner, behind which the house lies like Sleep­ing Beauty. Here again the need for pri­vacy seems to mani­fest itself; and time has done the rest.

A light fix­ture has grown into the bushes. Anoth­er one faces the drive­way of No. 1550; on it the street names „Monaco Drive“ and „San Remo Drive“, evok­ing the Medi­ter­ranean, the fash­ion­able coastal towns of the Rivi­era (the neigh­bour­hood is also called that), in whose flair Los Angeles likes to share. But one could also asso­ci­ate (Itali­an) „Monaco“ with „Munich“, and thus be with Thomas Mann’s former residence.

Original-Reconstruction?

As in New York, it is inter­est­ing to know who is respons­ible for the lights and can provide inform­a­tion about them. It is the city’s Bur­eau of Light­ing, to which I paid a vis­it. But in this „res­id­en­tial neigh­bour­hood“, the res­id­ents them­selves also take an interest. Bob Gale, author of the screen­play and co-pro­du­cer of „Back to the Future“ lives in the area (incid­ent­ally, so does Armin Mueller-Stahl, who por­trayed Thomas Mann in the series „The Manns“), is pres­id­ent of the loc­al homeown­ers’ asso­ci­ation and is very famil­i­ar with the dif­fer­ent types of lamps and their his­tory, even send­ing pho­tos of them. He recom­mends recon­struc­tion in Ger­many as the most eco­nom­ic­al meth­od of obtain­ing lamps – prob­ably also because he comes from the film industry.

The ques­tion of original/reconstruction will con­tin­ue to occupy me; it is also rel­ev­ant to Thomas Mann’s former res­id­ence and the way it is treated. First of all, how­ever, I am quite happy to see the lumin­aires in their spa­tial con­text on site.

The lamps, espe­cially when they stand so over­grown and ram­shackle in the bushes, tell of the city’s ambi­tion, its grandeur, its façade-like qual­ity. Installed in the 1920s to 1940s, they stood here when Thomas Mann moved into his newly built Bauhaus-style res­id­ence – which was more mod­ern com­pared to the his­tor­icising, opu­lent lamps.

Inside Thomas Mann House

In 2016, the Ger­man state acquired the house and set it up as the Thomas Mann House as a res­id­ence for schol­ar­ship hold­ers, a place for meet­ings and events. Nikolai Blaumer, pro­gramme dir­ect­or, leads me through the house and garden. The lib­rary is being recon­struc­ted, books are arriv­ing from many places and insti­tu­tions, includ­ing Yale.

The impres­sion: it’s a good place to work. The fur­nish­ings are func­tion­al, new, com­fort­able, without excess­ive lux­ury. The ref­er­ence to Thomas Mann is also pleas­antly restrained: a few pho­tos, but no hagi­o­graph­ic sta­ging in which the per­son of the former land­lord would fol­low you at every turn. Meet schol­ars, includ­ing the Ger­man­ist Stefan Kep­pler-Tasaki. Talk about the memori­al pro­ject. He knows a lot about the Manns and their contemporaries.

As in the garden with its high hedge, there are also ele­ments in the archi­tec­ture that demarc­ate and emphas­ise a space of their own: the wall drawn for­ward from the corner of the study, which, at Thomas Mann’s request, was to provide pro­tec­tion from view and noise.

From the garden you have a view over to the hill range with the former house of Lion Feucht­wanger, today as Villa Aurora also a res­id­ence for artists, writers, musi­cians. Next to it is the Getty Museum. Even fur­ther away, perched on a hill, is the Getty Cen­ter. The area is full of big names, insti­tu­tions and buildings.

As I return from San Remo Drive, I catch the bus head­ing into the city – with the same bus driver as on the out­ward jour­ney – and am greeted cas­u­ally by a man in a mint-col­oured shirt: „Take a seat, relax, cold drinks will be served.“ Cali­for­ni­an relaxation.

A few days later I’m back at the Manns’ former home. Fran­cis Fukuyama is giv­ing a short talk, along the lines of the radio addresses „Ger­man listen­ers!“ Thomas Mann’s in the 1940s. Fukuyama expects a strength­en­ing of the left/liberals as a reac­tion to Trump, and is „not too pess­im­ist­ic“ about the future.

At the small recep­tion after­wards, to my sur­prise, I meet Thomas Demand, who has lived in LA for ten years. With regard to the memori­al, he recom­mends Chris Burden’s install­a­tion of hun­dreds of street lights in front of LACMA to me. It has become a favour­ite of the pub­lic, a land­mark of the museum, even of the city, in that ubi­quit­ous ele­ments of pub­lic space with which res­id­ents identi­fy are brought togeth­er in a con­cen­trated way and strictly ordered accord­ing to their size – so that they can be seen from a distance.

For a moment, I feel like I belong to the schol­ar­ship hold­ers; besides those from the Thomas Mann House, there are also some from the Villa Aurora. LA turns out to be an inter­est­ing hot­spot, des­pite or per­haps because of the stark con­trasts, of archi­tec­tur­al land­marks and rampant home­less­ness, of glam­our and neg­lect.
I regret that I can­’t stay longer. I have to con­tin­ue my jour­ney to Brazil, to São Paulo, my last stop.

By chance, now, at the end of my stay, I am asked to evac­u­ate: there is a fire. When, dur­ing a vis­it to the Villa Getty, a recon­struc­ted villa from Pom­peii, there are clouds of smoke in the sky and it is rain­ing ash, it is strangely fitting.