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).
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.
