Julia Mann The concealed heritage

Researcher Veronika Fuechtner examines the enormous influence Julia Mann had on the aesthetics of her son Thomas Mann's work, and explains in the interview why literary criticism addresses this aspect so scantly if at all. 

A few days after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, Thomas Mann stated in an interview with Sergio Buarque de Holanda that the most decisive influence on his work was the “Brazilian blood” he inherited from his mother, Julia Mann. At the time, he was already over 50 years old. What took the writer so long to talk about that?

In fact, he had mentioned Julia’s Brazilian origins prior to World War I, when defending himself from an anti-Semitic attack by Adolf Bartels, an important German intellectual during the Nazi period. At the time, Thomas still spoke of his roots in terms of a “Latinidad.” There was a certain shame attached to Brazil, a stigma. Later, during the Weimar Republic, he embraced his roots a little more, but he maintained the strategy of connecting himself to Southern Europe. Julia was seen as “Spanish” or “Portuguese.” The Mann family knew about their mother’s indigenous roots, but there was an effort to whiten those origins, considering them as European. It was only in exile in the United States that he really engaged and took a greater interest in Brazil. And the meaning of what it meant to be Brazilian also changed for the Mann family.

Changed in what sense?

Thomas Mann’s Brazilian origins became potentially interesting for him in exile. There was a certain exoticism in Brazil that clearly placed him on a level that was similar to other exiled writers. He compared his origins, for example, with those of other exiled Jewish writers and claimed that his roots made him a “cosmopolitan.” In other words, being Brazilian became something positive and interesting in that context. Beyond that, as he identified and made connections with Jewish life, through his wife Katia Mann  and his children, considered Jews in the “Third Reich,” he was forced to confront racism and anti-Semitism, making a connection with his own origins.

The life stories of the Mann family are very popular among readers in Germany, but for a long time Julia’s life did not seem to rouse much interest. In 2018, the book, “Julia Mann, die Mutter von Heinrich und Thomas Mann: Eine Biographie” (Julia Mann, Mother of Heinrich and Thomas Mann: A Biography), by Dagmar von Gersdorff was published in the country, which is said to be the first biography of the matriarch. How can this silence be explained?

It's incredible that there had not been any biography about her until then, given the fact that there is a vast bibliography on the women in Thomas Mann’s life—except on his mother. Julia Mann’s memory was marginalized because it undermined Thomas’s image as a “super-German” writer. However, he was not only German; he was many things: Brazilian, American, Swiss… And there was also a certain prejudice against the intellectual role of women. Julia played a major role in her sons’ Thomas and Heinrich’s intellectual and aesthetic development, having financed the early stages of their artistic pursuits.

She also wrote fiction, which was only published in the 1980s, and had a huge impact, especially on Thomas’s aesthetics: the author’s manic minute description of furniture, rooms and entire décors, for instance, is something that his mother also did in her literature. She also wrote passages for her sons to use in their books, as did other women in the Mann family. Julia Mann’s absence from the research is partly due to prejudice about what it meant to be German, but also to prejudice against the role of women in a man’s intellectual life. Both of those points are very important.

You have just written a monograph titled “ The Magician’s Mother: Julia Mann’s Germany and Thomas Mann’s Brazil”, which will be published at the end of 2025. What new perspectives does the work present?

In the first part of the book, my aim is to contextualize Julia Mann’s childhood in Paraty. Usually, the only source cited about her childhood is her memoirs,  told in her autobiography, Aus Dodos Kindheit (From Dodô’s Childhood). That autobiography is problematic because it romanticizes Brazil. She describes the country as a lost paradise. I try to situate her autobiography in her time, and I talk, for example, about the life of the enslaved on the Boa Vista Farm, about the indigenous population and about the businesses of Julia’s father, Johann Ludwig Hermann Bruhns . The Bruhns were well-connected to the Brazilian court and had relations with Dom Pedro II.

Secondly, I discuss Julia Mann’s own literature. As a writer, she was interested in family relationships: what it meant to be a woman and what female solidarity was, for example, were important topics to her. I also write about the posthumous life of her literature in that of her children: there are many traces of Julia’s aesthetics not only in Heinrich Mann’s Zwischen den Rassen (Between the Races), but also in Thomas’s novels, such as The Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks.

Lastly, I discuss how Julia Mann invested in the process of making her sons “super-Germans.” She loved Goethe, talked about Wagner, Nietzsche and Romantic literature. For her, that was German culture. “Being German” was a cultural association, not necessarily a national or racial one. And I think that discussion was crucial to the whole family.

Julia was raised by Ana, an enslaved woman. Did her Afro-Brazilian heritage have an impact on her education?

Absolutely. Her relationship with Ana, who was from Mozambique, was paramount to Julia Mann, who considered her a second mother. In her memoirs, Julia describes the pain she felt when they were separated in Lübeck, and Ana returned to Brazil. For Julia, the songs she heard the enslaved sing in Paraty were part of her “primitive” musical training which prepared her to later become a person who sang and played piano. Ana was instrumental to her learning. And the issue of having been educated by a person who was not considered to be at the same hierarchical level became an important theme in the Manns’ literature. In Doctor Faustus, for example, the protagonist Adrian Leverkühn describes the musical education of the servant who sings with children and who has this, in his words, “primitive” relationship with music, which prepares him for his musical education.  

You define Thomas Mann as an author with “Migrationsgeschichte” (migration history). What reactions has this generated?

I do that ironically, because that terminology is problematic. It’s a term that emerged after 1945, and it is used in contemporary literature, but it is a racial term. Nobody thinks about the “migration history” of an author from Sweden, for instance. It is absurd that contemporary authors who grew up in Germany, who always wrote in German, are considered to have a “migration history,” whereas writers who are part of the German canon are not.

In Germany, the notion of migration literature is now viewed more critically, but the category is still in use. When I use the term “migration history” to talk about Thomas Mann, it irritates people, but it is legitimate, because his mother was from Brazil, and she sang in Portuguese — there was this other language in the family, this whole background. If the term is important for contemporary literature, why not for modern literature?