Golo Mann

Origins and early life

Golo Mann was born Angelus Gottfried Thomas Mann in Munich on 27 March 1909, the third child of Thomas Mann and of Katia Mann, born Pringsheim; his maternal grandfather, the mathematician Alfred Pringsheim, was a Jew who refused baptism all his life and whom the Nazi state forced in 1938 to carry the name 'Israel', and this fiche rests on that grandfather alone, noting that Katia and her children were baptized Protestants.

A pupil of Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg, where he took his doctorate on Hegel in 1932, he left Germany with his family in 1933, taught in France at Saint-Cloud and Rennes, and edited in Zurich the exile review Mass und Wert; interned in France in 1940, he escaped with his uncle Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler on foot over the Pyrenees, in the party that Varian Fry's network guided to Spain, and reached America.

Work and career

He served in the United States Army, taught history at Claremont College in California, and returned to Europe in 1958 — the year of his Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, the history of modern Germany that became the most widely read in the language, written for citizens rather than for professors. His Wallenstein of 1971, a thousand pages on the general of the Thirty Years' War, is one of the great biographies in German, and he was for thirty years a public voice — a supporter of Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, later a conservative, always the son who had lived in his father's shadow and wrote of it with bitterness in his memoirs. He died at Leverkusen on 7 April 1994.