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SPEAKER_05: Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, and this is Womanica. We're celebrating Pride Month with icons, supreme queens of queer culture. Some are household names. Others are a little more behind the scenes. All defied social norms and influenced generations of people to be unapologetically themselves. Today we're talking about an actress, writer, and war journalist whose work always marched towards two goals, anti-fascism and freedom of choice. Let's talk about Erika Mann. Erika was born in Munich in 1905. She was the oldest of six children. Her mother, Katja, came from a wealthy family of Jewish heritage. Her father, the novelist Thomas Mann, would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Just a few days after Erika turned one year old, her brother, Klaus, was born. The two became insufferable and would remain that way for the rest of their lives. Life in the Mann household was unconventional. Once, amid the food shortages of World War I, a single fig was left over after the family had divided up their provisions. Thomas picked up the fig and dropped it onto Erika's plate. Her younger siblings stared at their father in disbelief. Thomas looked around the table and said, "'One should get the children used to injustice early.'" But Erika never really did. As kids, Erika and Klaus formed a theater troupe with a few friends. They called themselves the Association of German Mimics. By the early 1920s, Erika had begun her stage career in earnest, moving to Berlin and studying under the famed director Max Reinhardt. In 1924, Klaus wrote a play called Anya and Esther about an erotic quartet of friends who were in love with each other. Klaus and Erika played two of the roles while their friends, Gustav Grünckens and Pamela Wiedekind, acted out the other two. Life imitated art. Gustav and Erika paired off, as did Pamela and Klaus. And Erika fell in love with Pamela while Klaus and Gustav had an affair. Two years later, in 1926, Erika and Gustav married, but their union was short-lived. In 1927, after traveling around the world with her brother, Klaus, Erika returned to Germany and parted ways with Gustav, fully divorcing him in 1929. In the coming years, Gustav would find success as an actor in Nazi Germany, and his possible collaborations with Nazis would inspire Klaus's most famous work, a novel called Mephisto. Erika, meanwhile, leaned deeper into anti-fascism work. In 1932, she caught the attention of the Nazi party when she read a Victor Hugo poem at an anti-war meeting. A man in the audience shouted, "'You are a criminal, Jewish, traitorous, "'international agitator.' Then, all hell broke loose. Nazi stormtroopers attacked audience members with chairs, filled with rage at Erika's performance. A Nazi newspaper called her a flat-footed hyena. But Erika refused to back down. In fact, she sued the newspaper and won. The next year, she founded a cabaret with Klaus. They called it Die Pfeffermuehle, or the pepper mill. Erika wrote most of the content, and most of the content made Nazis the punchline. The pepper mill became a haven for artists and anti-fascists, but danger was on the horizon. On January 30th, 1933, a month after the pepper mill opened, Hitler was made chancellor of Germany. By February, the pepper mill had been banned, and by March, Erika was forced to flee Germany, along with the rest of her family. Erika was now in exile, but she refused to be silent. She reassembled the pepper mill, building it up from scratch in her new home of Zurich, Switzerland. Erika was hardly the only artist who'd fled Germany. Thousands of creatives had been labeled degenerate artists and had run for neighboring countries. A movement of exile cabarets followed. Erika's pepper mill became one of the most important German-speaking spaces in Europe and the most political cabaret on the scene. The Nazis were furious. In 1935, they revoked her citizenship. Fearing Nazi Germany's wrath, a string of cities revoked the cabaret's performance permit. By 1936, the pepper mill was forced to close. Once again, Erika refused to give up. She and her brother Klaus headed to the US to warn the Americans of the dangers of Nazism. They traveled coast to coast, delivering passionate lectures. Nazism was not just a European problem, they said. It was a danger to the whole world. Their words, delivered years before the start of World War II, would prove hauntingly true. As fascism swept through Europe, Erika grew into a war journalist. She covered the Spanish Civil War, the Blitz in London, and battlefields in North Africa, France, and even Germany. Later, she covered the Nuremberg Trials, which tried and convicted Nazi war criminals. Erika died in 1969 in Switzerland. The last years of her life were marked by personal tragedy. In the late 1940s, the Cold War and McCarthyism made Erika a target in the US, her adopted country. In 1949, her brother Klaus died of an overdose. In 1955, her father died. Erika spent the last years of her life in exile, never again living in Germany as a citizen. Erika's legacy lives on in her creative ferocity, her marriage of arts and politics, and her refusal to stay silent in the face of cruelty. All month, we're celebrating Pride with Icons. For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram at Wamanica Podcast. Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator. Talk to you tomorrow.
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