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The Brothers Mann

Gems and liberties in a collective biography
by
October 2009, no. 315

House Of Exile: The Life and times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann by Evelyn Juers

Giramondo, $32.95 pb, 384 pp

The Brothers Mann

Gems and liberties in a collective biography
by
October 2009, no. 315

Evelyn Juers’s wide-ranging and suggestive study of Heinrich Mann (older brother of Thomas) and his second wife, Nelly Kroeger-Mann, opens with a vivid extended anecdote, recounting a meeting between the couple and Bertolt Brecht at a fruit market in Los Angeles, in the summer of 1944. Members of the community of European exiles in Los Angeles had flocked to the market because a farmer ‘was selling berries … Not just strawberries, blueberries … [but] also … gooseberries’. Jokingly translating the English word into Gaensebeeren (the actual German is Stachelbeeren), Brecht is caught handing out ‘a great mound of amber fruit’, giving Heinrich and Nelly ‘a translucent gem to taste’, and wittily punning ‘that he was no gooseberry fool’.

House Of Exile: The Life and times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann

House Of Exile: The Life and times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann

by Evelyn Juers

Giramondo, $32.95 pb, 384 pp

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