36 Facts About Erika Mann

Erika Julia Hedwig Mann was a German actress and writer, daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann.

Erika Mann continued to attack Nazism, most notably with her 1938 book School for Barbarians, a critique of the Nazi education system.

Erika Mann attended the Nuremberg trials before moving to America to support her exiled parents.

Erika Mann wrote a biography of her father and died in Zurich in 1969.

Erika Mann was born in Munich, the first-born daughter of German writer and later Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann and his wife, Katia, the daughter of an intellectual German family of Jewish heritage.

Erika Mann was named after Katia Mann's brother Erik, who died early, Thomas Mann's sister Julia and her great-grandmother Hedwig Dohm.

Erika Mann was baptized Protestant, just as her mother had been.

Thomas Erika Mann expressed in a letter to his brother Heinrich Erika Mann his disappointment about the birth of his first child:.

In Erika Mann he had a particular trust, which later showed itself in that she exercised a great influence on the important decisions of her father.

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.

Erika Mann founded an ambitious theater troupe, the Laienbund Deutscher Mimiker.

In 1924, Erika Mann began theater studies in Berlin and acted there and in Bremen.

Erika Mann was involved as an actor in the 1931 film about lesbianism, Madchen in Uniform, directed by Leontine Sagan, but left the production before its completion.

In 1932, Erika Mann was denounced by the Brownshirts after she read a pacifist poem to an anti-war meeting.

Erika Mann was fired from an acting role after the theatre concerned was threatened with a boycott by the Nazis.

Erika Mann successfully sued both the theatre and a Nazi-run newspaper.

Also in 1932 Erika Mann had a role, alongside Therese Giehse, in the film Peter Voss, Thief of Millions.

Erika Mann was the last member of the Mann family to leave Germany after the Nazi regime was elected.

Erika Mann saved many of Thomas Mann's papers from their Munich home when she escaped to Zurich.

Erika Mann asked Christopher Isherwood if he would marry her so she could become a British citizen.

Erika Mann declined but suggested she approach the gay poet W H Auden, who readily agreed to a marriage of convenience in 1935.

In 1937, Erika Mann moved to New York, where Die Pfeffermuhle opened its doors again.

Erika Mann reported from recent battlefields in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Erika Mann entered Germany in June 1945 and was among the first Allied personnel to enter Aachen.

When she arrived in Berlin on 3 July 1945, Erika Mann was shocked at the level of destruction, describing the city as "a sea of devastation, shoreless and infinite".

Erika Mann was equally angry at the complete lack of guilt displayed by some of the German civilians and officials that she met.

Erika Mann attended the Nuremberg trial each day from the opening session, on 20 November 1945, until the court adjourned a month later for Christmas.

Erika Mann interviewed the defense lawyers and ridiculed their arguments in her reports and made clear that she thought the court was indulging the behaviour of the defendants, in particular Hermann Goring.

Erika Mann's health was poor and on 1 January 1946, she collapsed and was hospitalised.

In May 1946, Erika Mann left Germany for California to help look after her father who was being treated for lung cancer.

From America, Erika Mann continued to comment on and write about, the situation in Germany.

In particular, Erika Mann objected to what she considered the lenient treatment of cultural figures, such as the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, who had stayed in Germany throughout the Nazi period.

In 1949, becoming increasingly depressed and disillusioned over postwar Germany's occupation, Klaus Erika Mann died by suicide.

In 1952, due to the anti-communist red scare and the numerous accusations from the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Erika Mann family left the US and she moved back to Switzerland with her parents.

Erika Mann had begun to help her father with his writing and had become one of his closest confidantes.

Erika Mann died in Zurich on 27 August 1969 from a brain tumour and is buried at Friedhof Kilchberg in Zurich, the site of her parents' graves.