We cordially invite you to the event Thomas Mann’s Los Angeles: Discussion with Michaela Ullmann and Benno Herz on Wednesday, August 24th at 7 p.m. (PT) at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena. Exile Studies Librarian and Instruction Coordinator at USC Libraries’ Special Collections Michaela Ullmann and Benno Herz, Program Director of the Thomas Mann House and co-editor, will engage in a conversation on the publication of Thomas Mann’s Los Angeles: Stories from Exile 1940-1952.

The book Thomas Mann’s Los Angeles: Stories from Exile 1940-1952 (Angel City Press) explores the Mann families’ connections to the city and the network of intellectuals they found there, including writers such as Vicki Baum and Aldous Huxley and musicians such as Alma Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg. Short texts accompanied by maps, a rich selection of historic images, contemporary photographs and vivid anecdotes guide the reader through this fascinating community. After fleeing Nazi Germany, writer and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann found refuge for himself and his family in the Pacific Palisades, a quiet residential neighborhood in Los Angeles between Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean. Mann was one of many European intellectuals who fled to Los Angeles, forming a community known as “Weimar on the Pacific.”

The conversation will highlight Michaela Ullmann’s chapter on Heinrich and Nelly Mann and their hardships in Los Angeles. They will discuss what the stories of the 1940s exile community might reveal to us today and highlight the work of the Thomas Mann House.