Abstract

»[...] so we have a modern house. We like it, though«,

White 1948, 5.

reported Katja Mann about the villa, where she and her husband, writer and Nobel-prize-winner Thoman Mann, lived from 1942 to 1952 during most time of their exile in the USA. The house was in the spotlight, especially among the German public, from 2016 to 2018, when it was acquired by the Federal Republic of Germany and renovated as a venue for a residency programme. This article brings together evidence from the on-site renovation with information from the research literature, Thomas Mann’s diary entries and other sources. The result is a new perspective on the planning stages and on the question of who is responsible for what part of the authorship, in particular which elements can be ascribed to the architect J. R. Davidson and which to the Manns’ experience of bourgeois European life, deeply rooted in the 19^th century.

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