Early life Erika Mann was born in
Munich, the first-born daughter of
German writer and later
Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann and his wife,
Katia (née Pringsheim), the daughter of an intellectual German family of
Jewish heritage. Due to her being the granddaughter of
Júlia da Silva Bruhns, she was also of Portuguese-Indigenous Brazilian partial descent. She was named after Katia Mann's brother Erik, who died early, Thomas Mann's sister and her great-grandmother
Hedwig Dohm. She was baptized
Protestant, just as her mother had been. Thomas Mann expressed in a letter to his brother
Heinrich Mann his disappointment about the birth of his first child: Nevertheless, he later candidly confessed in the notes of his diary, that he "preferred, of the six, the two oldest [Erika and
Klaus] and
little Elisabeth with a strange decisiveness". In Erika he had a particular trust, which later showed itself when she exercised great influence on her father's important decisions. Her particular role was also known by her siblings, as her brother
Golo Mann remembered: "Little Erika must salt the soup". This reference to the twelve-year-old Erika from the year 1917 was an often-used phrase in the Mann family. After Erika's birth came that of her brother Klaus, with whom she was personally close her entire life. They went about "like twins" and Klaus described their closeness as follows: "our solidarity was absolute and without reservation". Eventually there were four more children in total, including Golo,
Monika, Elisabeth and
Michael. The children grew up in Munich. On their mother's side the family belonged to the influential urban upper class and their father came from a commercial family from
Lübeck and already had published the successful novel
Buddenbrooks in 1901. The Mann home was a gathering-place for intellectuals and artists and Erika was hired for her first theater engagement before finishing her
Abitur at the
Deutsches Theater in
Berlin.
Education and early theatrical work In 1914, the Mann family obtained a villa on 1 Poschingerstraße in
Bogenhausen, which in the family would come to be known as "Poschi." From 1912 to 1914, Erika Mann attended a private school with her brother, joining for a year the Bogenhausener Volksschule, and from 1915 to 1920 she attended the
Höhere Mädchenschule am St. Annaplatz. In May 1921, she transferred to the Munich-based
Luisengymnasium. Together with her brother Klaus, she befriended children in the neighborhood, including
Bruno Walter's daughters, Gretel and Lotte Walter, as well as
Ricki Hallgarten, the son of a
Jewish intellectual family. Erika Mann founded an ambitious theater troupe, the Laienbund Deutscher Mimiker. While still a student at the Munich Luisengymnasium,
Max Reinhardt engaged her to appear on the stage of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin for the first time. The partially mischievous pranks that she undertook in the so-called "Herzogpark-Bande" ("
Herzogpark gang") with Klaus and her friends prompted her parents to send both her and Klaus to a
progressive residential school, the
Bergschule Hochwaldhausen, located in
Vogelsberg in
Oberhessen. This period in Erika Mann's schooling lasted from April to July 1922; subsequently she returned to the Luisengymnasium. In 1924 she passed the
Abitur, albeit with poor marks, and began her theatrical studies in Berlin that were again interrupted, because of her numerous engagements in
Hamburg, Munich, Berlin and elsewhere.
1920s and 1930s In 1924, Erika Mann began theater studies in Berlin and acted there and in
Bremen. In 1925, she played in the première of her brother Klaus's play
Anja und Esther. The play, about a group of four friends who were in love with each other, opened in October 1925 to considerable publicity. In 1924 the actor
Gustaf Gründgens had offered to direct the production and play one of the lead male roles, alongside Klaus, with Erika and Pamela Wedekind as the female leads. During the year they worked on the play together, Klaus was engaged to Wedekind and Erika became engaged to Gründgens. Erika and Pamela were also in a relationship together, as were, for a time, Klaus and Gustaf. For their honeymoon, in July 1926, Erika and Gründgens stayed in a hotel that Erika and Wedekind had used as a couple shortly before, with the latter checking in dressed as a man. Erika's marriage to Gründgens was short-lived and they were soon living apart before divorcing in 1929. In 1936, her brother Klaus wrote the book
Mephisto, whose main character was loosely based on Gründgens, posed as a man who sold his soul to the devil, (the Nazis). The book, which drew a lawsuit from Gründgens' nephew in the 1960s, was made into a
film of the same name in 1981, starring
Klaus Maria Brandauer. Erika Mann would later have relationships with
Therese Giehse,
Annemarie Schwarzenbach and
Betty Knox, with whom she served as a war correspondent during World War II. In 1927, Erika and Klaus undertook a trip around the world, Also in 1932 Mann had a role, alongside Therese Giehse, in the film
Peter Voss, Thief of Millions. In January 1933, Erika, Klaus and Therese Giehse founded a
cabaret in Munich called
Die Pfeffermühle, for which Erika wrote most of the material, much of which was
anti-Fascist. The cabaret lasted two months before the Nazis forced it to close and Mann left Germany. She asked
Christopher Isherwood if he would marry her so she could become a British citizen. He declined but suggested she approach the gay poet
W. H. Auden, who readily agreed to a
marriage of convenience in 1935. In 1936, Auden introduced
Therese Giehse, Mann's lover, to the writer
John Hampson and they too married so that Giehse could leave Germany. The following year, they published
Escape to Life, a book about famous German exiles.
World War II third from right During
World War II, Mann worked as a journalist in London, making radio broadcasts, in German, for the
BBC throughout the
Blitz and the
Battle of Britain. After
D-Day, she became a war correspondent attached to the Allied forces advancing across Europe. She reported from recent battlefields in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Her views on Russia and on the
Berlin Airlift led to her being branded a Communist in America. She was 63. ==Biographical films==