House of Exile

In 1933, the author and activist Heinrich Mann and his partner Nelly Kroeger fled Nazi Germany, finding refuge first in the south of France and later, in great despair, in Los Angeles. Nelly committed suicide in 1944, and Heinrich died in 1950.

Born into a wealthy middle-class family in Lübeck, Heinrich was one of the leading representatives of Weimar culture. Nelly was twenty-seven years younger, the adopted daughter of a fisherman, and a hostess in a Berlin bar. As far as his family was concerned, she was from the wrong side of the tracks.

Their story is intertwined with others from their circle, including Heinrich's brother Thomas Mann, his sister Carla, and their friends Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Joseph Roth. In train compartments, ship's cabins, and rented rooms, they called upon what was left to them—their bodies, their minds, their books—and amidst the debris of an era of self-destruction, built their own annexes to the House of Exile.