March 2022

Thomas Mann was one of many European artists and intellectuals who made Los Angeles their new home in the 1930s and 40s. This seminar will examine Mann's connections to the city and his network of intellectuals with whom he was in dialogue, including sociologists Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, writers such as Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley, composers Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, and filmmakers Ernst Lubitsch and Jean Renoir.    

The seminar will be led by Professor Wendy Perla Kurtz and Anthony Caldwell, Assistant Director of the Digital Research Consortium at UCLA, as well as by Nikolai Blaumer, Program Director of the Thomas Mann House, and Benno Herz, Project and Communications Manager at the Thomas Mann House. During the course, students will connect practices in digital humanities to the subjects of the class. 

For more information visit: https://dh.ucla.edu/undergradcourses/

Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V. is supported by the German Federal Foreign Office and Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

A girl in half profile: dark hair, red cap, alert look. The painting (oil on cardboard, 41.5 x 35.5 cm) shows Katia Pringsheim, later Thomas Mann's wife, portrayed by Franz von Lenbach. The famous Munich painter produced numerous portraits of members of the Pringsheim family - but this portrait, which is being presented to the public for the first time today, was only recently identified - its provenance had been concealed when it was sold in 1940.

Talking about the history of the portrait as well as difficulties and opportunities in dealing with Nazi fugitive property:

Katrin Stoll, head of the auction house Neumeister, the provenance expert Alfred Grimm (former Bavarian National Museum), the historian Dirk Heißerer, the managing director of the Thomas Mann House Heike Catherina Mertens and Robert Schoenhofer, whose grandfather acquired the "Portrait of a Girl" in 1940. Afterwards, Robert Schoenhofer, together with Thomas Mann's grandson Frido Mann and Tamara Marwitz, great-granddaughter of Hedwig Pringsheim, representing the descendants of Hedwig and Alfred Pringsheim, will hand over the painting to the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades.

The seminar begins with an overview of transatlantic cultural, literary, and historical studies going as far back as the colonial era (New Spain, Mexican California). Then, it examines the displacement and dispossession of Indigenous peoples in southern California by Anglo-Americans and European settlers during the nineteenth century, followed by a targeted investigation of transatlantic relations between Angelenos and German immigrants during the twentieth century.

Students apply their newly acquired knowledge to current transatlantic debates in culture, politics, and society. By integrating these lessons into community-engaged interviews with four Thomas Mann Fellows, they explore on a weekly basis concrete, praxis-oriented approaches to transatlantic European studies. Part of the class will be the Thomas Mann Fellows Sunhild Kleingärtner, Christine Landfried, Andreas Nitsche, and Claus Pias. Students go back and forth between Professor David Kim’s seminar on campus and a community-engaged project. In addition, they participate in an interview workshop led by Lynell George, a renowned journalist and essayist. Last but not least, they work with Jimmy Zavala at the UCLA Library Special Collections and with Michaela Ullmann at the USC Libraries Special Collections. The outcome of their individual and collaborative work is a set of public-facing projects shared with communities near and far and during a presentation at the Thomas Mann House in June.

The seminar is led by David D. Kim, Professor at the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles in collaboration with Nikolai Blaumer, Program Director, and Benno Herz, Project and Communications Manager.

Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V. is supported by the German Federal Foreign Office and Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.