Erika Mann

Erika Julia Hedwig Mann (9 November 1905 – 27 August 1969) was a German actress and writer, daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann.

Erika lived a bohemian lifestyle in Berlin and became a critic of National Socialism. After Hitler came to power in 1933, she moved to Switzerland, and married the poet W. H. Auden, purely to obtain a British passport and so avoid becoming stateless when the Germans cancelled her citizenship. She continued to attack Nazism, most notably with her 1938 book School for Barbarians, a critique of the Nazi education system.

During World War II, Mann worked for the BBC and became a war correspondent attached to the Allied forces after D-Day. She attended the Nuremberg trials before moving to America to support her exiled parents. Her criticisms of American foreign policy led to her being considered for deportation. After her parents moved to Switzerland in 1952, she also settled there. She wrote a biography of her father and died in Zürich in 1969.

Biography

Early life

Erika Mann was born in Munich, the first-born daughter of German writer and later Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann and his wife, Katia (née Pringsheim), the daughter of an intellectual German family of Jewish heritage. Due to her being the granddaughter of Júlia da Silva Bruhns, she was also of Portuguese-Indigenous Brazilian partial descent. She was named after Katia Mann's brother Erik, who died early, Thomas Mann's sister Julia and her great-grandmother Hedwig Dohm. She was baptized 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: