November 4, 2020

The juries of Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V. selected the scholarship recipients for the years 2021 and 2022 for the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 residencies were partially postponed to the following year.

July 30, 2020

The Thomas Mann House Advisory Board selected the following six fellowship recipients for a 2021 residency at the former home of Thomas Mann in Los Angeles:

#MutuallyMann was an interactive reading experience and a space for transatlantic conversation in times of social distancing and quarantine.

Freimut Duve, former Member of the German Bundestag, died on March 3, 2020 in Hamburg after a long illness.

On January 9, Jan Philipp Reemtsma came to the Thomas Mann House to talk about democracy and emphatic language.

Ilse Helbrecht, a Thomas Mann Fellow and social geographer, recently met with the Canadian political geographer, Jennifer Hyndman, at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. In their conversation, the two acclaimed scholars are looking deeper into the meaning and transformation of the terms ‘exile’ and ‘refugee'.

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Author and Villa Aurora fellow Stefanie de Velasco went on strike for the climate and refuses to continue writing her next novel.

How can we use digital solutions to protect ourselves from fake news and discrimination? “Pocket Democracy”, a conference organized by the Thomas Mann House and Goethe Pop Up Seattle, interrogated that topic in a two-day format.

How is fear currently shaping our society? And can art play a role in addressing those fears? These questions were at the core of “Raising Fear: Film, Literature, and Political Responsibility” on Friday, July 5, at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles.  Moderated by Steven Lavine, chairman of the Thomas Mann House advisory board, the evening drew deep insights from the event’s esteemed guests: German state minister Monika Grütters, filmmaker Werner Herzog, and cultural scientist Ulrich Raulff. From art’s relationship with democracy, to misguided demonization, to fighting for an open culture, the relevancy of the night’s conversation was emphasized and punctuated by the rumblings of a distant 7.1 earthquake.

Following in his grandfather's tracks, Frido Mann is going to give lectures in more than a dozen cities in the United States and Canada. He will address the current crises in the American and European democracies and the need for their restoration, on the basis of transatlantic dialogue.

Starting in 2020, Villa Aurora &Thomas Mann House will award the Michael Ballhaus Fellowship under the patronage of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas. The annual fellowship is given to outstanding directors of photography in cooperation with the German Film Academy. The first laureate is the Berlin based D.P. Judith Kaufmann. The prize, in honor of the late director of photography Michael Ballhaus, consists of a three-month residence at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles and is financed by the German Foreign Office.

During his time as Thomas Mann Fellow from April to July, Andreas Platthaus is writing a blog sharing his impressions, life and research at the Thomas Mann House, Los Angeles. The blog is accompanied by artworks of illustrator Burkhard Neie.

Last Saturday, the day before the Oscars, the traditional reception in honor of the German Oscar nominees took place at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. This event was organized by Villa Aurora together with the German Consulate General L.A. and German Films. Partners of the reception are the German sponsors of the Oscar contributions, the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, FilmFernsehFonds Bayern, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Film- und Medienstiftung NRW, Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung and the Federal Foreign Office. The event was sponsored by Volkswagen, Dr. Hauschka and Crosby Doe Associates.

During his lifetime, German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger claimed not to keep a diary. Yet, in the 1990s, a treasure trove of his diaries from the years 1906-1940 was found in the apartment of Feuchtwanger’s long-time secretary Hilde Waldo. Now, for the first time ever, these diaries have been published by Aufbau publishing house in Berlin, allowing us to get to know Feuchtwanger as a chronicler of his life and of a central part of German history. Last December we presented the book at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles. You can rewatch the event in this video:

As a Thomas Mann Fellow in 2018, Jutta Allmendinger has been conducting her research on housing and homelessness in Los Angeles. We accompanied her during the “Skid Row Festival” in Downtown. Skid Row is an area of 0.4 square miles containing one of the largest populations of homeless people in the United States. Together with her colleague, Jürgen Robert von Mahs (New School, NY), Allmendinger made use of the opportunity to speak to some of Skid Row’s residents.

In cooperation with Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V., the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes grants another scholarship in 2019 for a stay at the artist's residence called Villa Aurora. Out of a variety of applications, the choice fell on the video and performance artist Max Göran. He will live and work in Los Angeles from early January to mid-February.

Sculptor and Villa Aurora Fellow Natascha Sadr Haghighian will represent Germany at the 58th Venice Biennale under the pseudonym Natascha Süder Happelmann. Franciska Zólyom, curator of the German Pavilion 2019, announced the collaboration with the artist on Thursday.

The Villa Aurora juries have selected the 2019 Fellows for the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles.

In our video blog, Heinrich Detering, a fellow at Thomas Mann House, tells the story of Thomas Mann's relationship with the Unitarian Church in Los Angeles.

"Styx", the first collaboration between Villa Fellows Ika Küntzel and Wolfgang Fischer, comes into cinemas on thursday.

The Board of Directors of Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V., in agreement with the Board of Trustees, has appointed Ms. Heike Catherina Mertens new Executive Director of the association, based in Berlin and effective October 1, 2018. Ms. Mertens succeeds Ms.Annette Rupp, who at her own request will leave the association end of September.

At the beginning of June, Laemmle's presents the film classic "Aimée & Jaguar" starring Villa Aurora Fellow Maria Schrader. The actress will be present.

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On Monday night, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier inaugurated the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles. More than 250 guests from the fields of culture, science, politics, and the media gathered in the house on San Remo Drive in Pacific Palisades, where the Mann Family lived during their US exile in the 1940s.

Jana Schulz has been a fellow of the German Studienstiftung at the Villa Aurora in the spring of 2018. In an interview with the Studienstiftung she talks about boxing and her experiences in L.A.

Villa Fellow Stefan Goldmann curates f(t) festival. The two day festival will highlight alternative concepts of time in music: Irregular metres, miniatures, works of gargantuan duration, idiosyncratic patterns, new practices for historic instruments and obsolete media, humanised machine time, mechanised improvisation, space-time relations in close proximity and at vast distance... and much more.

Around 300 representatives of the German and international film and cultural scene came together last Saturday at the annual reception at the Villa Aurora, German Films and the German Consulate General in Los Angeles to celebrate the German Oscar hopes.

Director RP Kahl was a Fellow of Villa Aurora in 2013. During this time he began his work on the feature film A THOUGHT OF ECSTACY, which is coming to German cinemas these days. We met him in Berlin for a chat.

Villa Fellow Silke Scheuermann takes over the renowned Frankfurt Poetikdozentur. As of January 23, 2018, she will speak about her poetology on three consecutive Tuesdays under the title JUST STILL DARK ENOUGH.

Berlin, November 22 and 23, 2017: Circuit Training is a workshop ensemble initiated & founded by Ignaz Schick 2013 in Berlin with the aim of bringing together musicians from different styles and scenes once or twice a year for working on new pieces of its core members.

Around 300 invited guests from culture, politics and the media came to the Komische Oper Berlin at the end of October to celebrate the VILLA AURORA & THOMAS MANN HOUSE NIGHT.

Filmmaker Justin B Rathke, also known as Justin Time, was a Fellow at Villa Aurora in spring 2013. Now he presents his film "Chasing houses", which was created during his stay in LA, this November in Berlin. We met him there.

Berlinische Galerie presents What Do You Want Here, an exhibition by Villa Fellow Cyrill Lachauer

The MFG Filmförderung Baden-Württemberg and FernsehfilmFestival Baden-Baden have announced the four nominees for the MFG-Star star award. The juror Dorothee Schön will award the prize-winner on December 1, 2017.

Kirsten Reeses's composition "Atmende Kugel" will premiered at Kontakte'17.

Sebastian Stumpf stayed at Villa Aurora in 2016. Some works that were created during this period are now being presented at Galerie Thomas Fischer in Berlin.

We congratulate the following artists, who have been selected for a fellowship at the artists' residence Villa Aurora in Los Angeles in 2018 by the jury from numerous applications. We look forward to welcome them in California.