Our guest on 24.05.2009 Frido Mann, Author and Psychologist
Frido Mann was the favorite grandchild of Thomas Mann. The Nobel Prize winner crafted a literary memorial to Frido in the form of his character, Nepomuk Schneidewein, called “Echo,” in the masterpiece “Doctor Faustus.”
This legacy has been a lifelong burden to the younger Mann, as his autobiography “Achterbahn” attests. Frido Mann studied music in Zurich and Rome, then theology and psychology in Germany. After working as a therapist in a hospital, he received a professorship in Münster. Yet at the beginning of the 1980s, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, he began to write. Mann’s experiences as a psychologist have shaped his literary work, in which he often grapples with his own family history.
Frido Mann was born in 1940 in Monterey, California, which the family made their home after fleeing the Nazis in Germany. His father, the musician and literary scholar Michael Mann, together with Golo and Monika, was among the "unloved" children of Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann. The rejection that Michael experienced at the hands of his father reemerged in his relationship with his own children. He sent his son to boarding schools before leaving young Frido with his grandparents, showing a constant and sometimes violent resentment toward his son. Grandparents Thomas and Katia Mann looked after Frido, first in the Pacific Palisades, then in Kilchberg near Zürich, where he later lived for several years during his music studies.
The Favorite Grandchild
Thomas Mann lovingly accepted his grandson, going so far as to describe Frido as his "last love." Fridolin Mann was, without a doubt, the favorite grandchild of Thomas Mann – as proven in the ardent entries of his diary. Thomas Mann modeled the Nepomuk Schneidewein character in his novel, "Doctor Faustus," after Frido – a literary memorial to his grandchild. Yet the question of why Thomas Mann made his young character die an agonizing death of meningitis at age 4 stayed with Frido his whole life. Upon the release of "Doctor Faustus" in 1947, Frido was seven years old, often staying with his grandparents in Los Angeles. At age 13, Frido read "Doctor Faustus" and it left him feeling used, abused and hurt. For decades, he refused to read any of his grandfather’s other novels.
Frido Mann was 15 when his grandfather died. To this day, he remembers how he felt at the cemetery in Kilchberg: "I felt a completely odd mix of emotions during the church service," he said. "And then, the whole way to the cemetery, it was grief on the one side, but also somewhere under the surface, there was the feeling of relief, not to the point of victory, but relief that this huge shadow – also this huge love – was gone. I thought, now I’m also free to do what I want."
Relief and Revival
Frido Mann pursued a number of educational aims, constantly changing his career path. He started his music studies when his father, who lived far from his children in California, gave up his position as a violist at the San Francisco Orchestra to pursue German studies. After successfully completing his own music degree, Frido Mann found employment as a répétiteur at the Zurich opera house. But a dramatic epiphany in the winter of 1963 quickly gave the 22-year-old’s life a new twist, leading him to convert to Catholicism and study theology in Munich.
The End of the Search
In Catholic theology, Frido Mann found his new spiritual home. He finished his doctorate and became assistant to the famous Karl Rahner. Though he opted to forego a professorship in fundamental theology, Frido instead studied psychology, eventually becoming director of the Institute for Medical Psychology at Münster University. At the same time, he was studying medicine. As a Swiss citizen, he went to East Germany in 1978 and 1979, where he received qualification through the Karl Marx University in Leipzig to become a psychotherapist. After returning to Münster, Frido found himself, once again, in a "no man’s land" between a number of academic and ideological pursuits. As a final "turning point" in his life, he took up writing during the mid-1980s, cutting short his study of medicine. In short order he wrote seven novels and traveled to Brazil to explore the legacy of his great-grandmother, Julia da Silva Bruhns. He founded the association "Casa Mann" and established an international cultural and meeting center in his great-grandmother’s birth house in Paraty, committed to furthering the world ethics program of Hans Küng. Meanwhile, he left the Catholic Church on account of the church’s handling of Holocaust denier Bishop Richard Williamson and the Society of St. Pius X.
Today, Frido Mann lives in Göttingen and Pfäffikon, Switzerland, with his wife, Christine Heisenberg, daughter of German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics. The couple has one son.