The Thomas Mann House survived the Palisades fire. We should heed Mann’s words

On the morning of the Palisades fire, Claudia Gordon quickly accepted that there was only so much she could do to save everything under her watch.

She helps manage the Pacific Palisades homes once owned by Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, bestselling German writers who moved to Los Angeles in the 1940s as part of an exodus of European intellectuals fleeing the Nazis. They transformed their residences into salons for fellow refugees and warned Americans that what happened in their homelands could happen anywhere.

Today, the Mann House and Villa Aurora, which is Feuchtwanger’s home, are cultural centers that offer residency programs for writers and artists whose work embraces the spirit of their former owners. The fate of the houses was out of Gordon’s hands, once it became apparent that the Palisades fire was going to rage.

She did what she could to save everything else, coordinating with staffers to make sure everyone was evacuated from the homes. At the Mann House, someone grabbed the complete works of Goethe, as well as Mann’s handwritten papers. Gordon and others took some paintings and a Renaissance-era Purim scroll from Villa Aurora but had to leave thousands of rare books and personal mementos behind.

Back in her own home, Gordon took solace and strength in the lives of the two men. She especially thought of Feuchtwanger, who refused to succumb to despair after losing homes in Germany and France to the Nazis and then building a new life in the U.S.

“If the worst happened” and the Mann House and Villa Aurora burned down, Gordon said, “that’s what we would have to do” — start over.

We were standing outside the sleek, two-story Thomas Mann House on a Friday morning last week. Accompanying us were the house’s director, Oliver Hartmann, and program director Benno Herz. Inside, high-powered air filters were sucking out all the toxic substances left over from the fire — the only damage incurred by the house, built in 1942 for Mann and his family and purchased by the German government in 2016 to save it from demolition.

“I never understood how a surgeon could operate for 20 hours,” said Gordon, 55, who has been director of Villa Aurora off and on since 2002 and is also director of administration for both houses. “But now I know how it works that adrenaline carries you so far.”

She looked at the Mann House’s gleaming white exterior, which had to be scrubbed down by hand after the fire. “It’s never been so clean,” she said with a sad chuckle.

This was going to be a big year for the institutions, which are funded by the German government. The Mann House had a full program planned for the 150th birthday of its namesake. Villa Aurora was readying for the 30th anniversary of its residency program. All events so far have been canceled, postponed or hosted at other spots across L.A.

The Mann House hopes to bring back its fellows in May. Villa Aurora also survived but is closed indefinitely as it awaits its own deep cleaning. But the two structures are at least standing. The homes of many of Mann’s and Feuchtwanger’s fellow European refugees didn’t make it.

A room inside the Thomas Mann House, which is now a cultural center. It survived the Palisades fire but remains closed as it gets a deep cleaning.

(David Butow / For The Times)

Herz, who joined the Mann House when it started its residency program in 2018, said the situation reminds him of the COVID years.

“We’re a young institution,” the 35-year-old deadpanned, “but very experienced in crises.”

In 2023, I contributed to a German-language book where writers were asked to reflect on a feature in the Mann House that spoke to modern-day L.A. I focused on a press release hanging near the staircase to Mann’s bedroom that quotes him saying, “In times of so deeply depressing circumstances a harmonious home background is of great significance.”

While writers like Mike Davis and Joan Didion were rightfully cited as prophetic voices after the Palisades and Eaton fires, we should pay attention to Mann and Feuchtwanger, whose words are especially relevant in an era where strongmen are on the rise worldwide and people are escaping from failing countries.

In his 1938 lecture “The Coming Victory of Democracy,” Mann said, “Even America feels today that democracy is not an assured possession, that it has enemies, that it is threatened from within and from without.”

Feuchtwanger, meanwhile, was criticizing the Nazis as early as the 1920s, culminating in his Wartesaal (“The Waiting Room”) trilogy, a set of novels that tracked the rise of Hitler and the Nazis’ persecution of Jews and others. That led the Nazis to burn Feuchtwanger’s books and his imprisonment in France under the Vichy regime.

“There’s the artistic Thomas Mann,” said Hartmann of the author, who won a Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. “But there’s also the political Mann, waiting to be rediscovered by each generation.

“And for Lion,” the 47-year-old Hartmann continued, “for him it was so important to counter stupidity with reason.”

He led us around the Mann House, as workers weaved around us with extension cords and ladders. Electric tape and spray cans were everywhere. At one point, Gordon nearly walked into a plastic sheet that sealed off a hallway from the living room.

We ended up in Mann’s study. Among the books that remained was a copy of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel “It Can’t Happen Here,” which imagined an America ruled by a fascist.

“It’s always dangerous to draw political parallels between the past and present,” Herz said, “but Mann went from becoming an admirer of FDR to experiencing the political shift to McCarthyism.” He eventually returned to Europe, after the House Un-American Activities Committee and the FBI began to target him.

“The takeaway that always stays with me is that things can always change,” Gordon added. “Lion never dared leave the United States because he was afraid they wouldn’t let him back in. But he wrote about not having self-pity in that. It was his hope and expectation that exile literature would stand the test of time.”

Outside, 25-year-old Isaac Rosales was looking at a bronze plaque with Mann’s face on it. I asked if he knew who Mann was.

“I’m assuming he’s really important,” the Colton resident replied in Spanish. “We [workers] always ask ourselves, ‘Who must that man be?’”

I gave Rosales a quick overview, highlighting how Mann fostered a community for immigrants from the house that Rosales was now helping to restore. The native of Mexico then smiled.

“L.A.’s always been a sanctuary for us, right?” he said.

Charred earth shows how close the Palisades fire came to Villa Aurora, the former home of famed German writer Lion Feuchtwanger, who arrived in Los Angeles after fleeing the Nazi regime.

(David Butow / For The Times)

Gordon and I bid farewell to Hartmann and Herz, then proceeded to Villa Aurora on the other side of the Palisades. The capriciousness of the fire quickly revealed itself.

An intact apartment complex stood across Sunset Boulevard from another that was completely devastated. The fenced-off Palisades Village, which owner Rick Caruso had hired private firefighters to protect, looked eerily immaculate. We passed by a checkpoint manned by the National Guard and the LAPD, then had to stop for 20 minutes on a narrow hillside road as a backhoe was unloaded from a flatbed truck.

The smell of smoke greeted us when we entered Villa Aurora, a two-story mansion originally built by the Los Angeles Times in 1928 as a model home for a planned neighborhood. Ashes covered a guest book opened to a page with its last signature dated Jan. 6.

Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife, Marta, moved here in 1943.

“He had to show an affidavit that he wouldn’t be a burden on taxpayers, just like asylum seekers have to do today,” Gordon said as we looked at historic photos and walked through Villa Aurora’s expansive rooms. “Lion was lucky that he was a bestseller at the time.”

Feuchtwanger is not as well-known in the U.S. as Mann, Gordon said, but he is seen as an important figure in Germany, especially for so openly and brilliantly opposing the Nazis as a Jewish man.

Gordon noted that Marta, by then a widow, climbed on the roof with a hose to save Villa Aurora during the 1961 Bel-Air fire.

“They speak to the ability to keep strength,” Gordon said, “in the face of catastrophe.”

Portraits of German writers Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger and Bertolt Brecht hang at Villa Aurora, the Pacific Palisades home once owned by Feuchtwanger.

(David Butow / For The Times)

We made our way to a second-floor office, which featured portraits of Mann, Feuchtwanger and fellow German exile Bertolt Brecht, as well as a spectacular view of the Pacific. From a balcony, I saw that the slope below me was scorched right up to the Villa Aurora property line. A dead eucalyptus tree still stood. It will be chopped down and turned into an art piece by a former Villa Aurora fellow to commemorate the Palisades disaster.

“That house over there is gone,” Gordon said, pointing toward the distance. “The other house is gone.”

She stayed quiet.

“We’re closed, but we’re not closed,” she concluded. “We’re still going.”