Life
Erika Mann was born in Munich and was the firstborn daughter of the writer and later Nobel-prize winner Thomas Mann and his wife, Katia (née Pringsheim), the daughter of an intellectual German family of Jewish heritage. She was named after Katia Mann's brother Erik, who died early, Thomas Mann's sister Julia Mann, and her grandmother Hedwig Dohm. She was baptized as a 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:
- "It is a girl; a disappointment for me, as I want to admit between us, because I had greatly desired a son and will not stop to hold such a desire. I feel a son is much more full of poetry, more than a sequel and restart for myself under new circumstances."
Nevertheless, he later candidly confessed in the notes of his diary, that he "preferred, of the six, the two oldest and little Elisabeth with a strange decisiveness".
In Erika he had a particular trust, which later showed itself in that she exercised a great influence on the important decisions of her father. 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 Mann 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 the mother's side the family belonged to the influential urban upper class, and the 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.
Read more about this topic: Erika Mann
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“It is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have ... insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“What was lost in the European cataclysm was not only the Jewish past—the whole life of a civilization—but also a major share of the Jewish future.... [ellipsis in source] It was not only the intellect of a people in its prime that was excised, but the treasure of a people in its potential.”
—Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)
“Undershaft: Alcohol is a very necessary article. It heals the sick—Barbara: It does nothing of the sort. Undershaft: Well, it assists the doctor: that is perhaps a less questionable way of putting it. It makes life bearable to millions of people who could not endure their existence if they were quite sober. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)