Erika Mann
Erika Mann · Arts & Literature
Founder of the anti-Nazi cabaret Die Pfeffermühle, war correspondent at Nuremberg and eldest child of Thomas Mann, granddaughter of the Jewish mathematician Alfred Pringsheim
9 novembre 1905, Munich, Allemagne — 27 août 1969, Zurich, Suisse
Munich, Zurich, New York
Erika Mann is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — Founder of the anti-Nazi cabaret Die Pfeffermühle, war correspondent at Nuremberg and eldest child of Thomas Mann, granddaughter of the Jewish mathematician Alfred Pringsheim
Origins and early life
Erika Mann was born in Munich on 9 November 1905, the eldest child of Thomas Mann and of Katia Mann, born Pringsheim; her maternal grandfather, the mathematician Alfred Pringsheim, was a Jew who never left his faith, and her maternal grandmother Hedwig Dohm was herself the daughter of a Jewish-born father — this fiche rests on that grandfather, and states that Erika, like her mother, was baptized a Protestant.
Work and career
She trained as an actress under Max Reinhardt, was married for three years to the actor Gustaf Gründgens, and wrote children's books and travel pieces, but her life turned on one date: on 1 January 1933, a month before Hitler took power, she opened in Munich the literary cabaret Die Pfeffermühle, The Peppermill, whose songs, written by her and set by Magnus Henning, mocked the Nazis with a lightness that did not survive the spring.
She took the troupe to Zurich and toured it through Europe for a thousand performances, the most successful of all the exile cabarets; Germany stripped her of her citizenship in 1935, and she married the poet W. H. Auden, a marriage of convenience that gave her a British passport. In the United States from 1936, she lectured across the country against Hitler, wrote School for Barbarians on Nazi education and, with her brother Klaus, Escape to Life on the German exiles, and covered the war and the Nuremberg trials as a correspondent for the BBC and the American press.
After the war she became her father's closest collaborator and, after his death, the editor of his letters; she died in Zurich on 27 August 1969.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/mann-erika-1905-1969
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Founder of the anti-Nazi cabaret Die Pfeffermühle, war correspondent at Nuremberg and eldest child of Thomas Mann, granddaughter of the Jewish mathematician Alfred Pringsheim
Source: https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/mann-erika-1905-1969
