Homesickness in paradise

The greatest German writer under the blazing Southern Californian sun: how can one write about Thomas Mann in exile today? Witty, funny and with casual seriousness - like Martin Mittelmeier! America's west coast, Los Angeles in the 1940s, is a dream place, and the exiles from Europe cannot believe their eyes. The play of colors, the light, the sea! Everyone who had no home in Nazi Germany was stranded here: Arnold Schönberg, Vicki Baum, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Helene Weigel, Franz and Alma Werfel - and above all: Thomas Mann. They celebrate, talk their heads off, argue about how things could go on after Hitler. Thomas Mann is the king of émigrés, admired, envied, hostile. In his villa in Pacific Palisades, he wants to bring the genuinely German roots of National Socialism to light in Doctor Faustus. At the same time, he takes on the role of a figurehead of "good Germany". Martin Mittelmeier's atmospherically dense story tells of the turbulence and triumphs of the Nobel Prize winner, who asks himself under palm trees how it could be possible: to be German, to make art, to love people.

Martin Mittelmeier has worked as an editor and program director at renowned publishing houses. In 2019, he was a visiting scholar at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is Honorary Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Cologne.

Admission: € 8 / 5 (CSH members)
Ticket reservation here.
Event language: German
In cooperation with the German Department of the University campus Freiburg