Katharina “Katia” Hedwig Mann, née Pringsheim (24.7.1883 Feldafing – 25.4.1980 Kilchberg/Switzerland)

Katia Mann was the daughter of Alfred Pringsheim, professor of mathematics at the University of Munich (from 1886 onwards) and patron of the arts, and the former actress Hedwig Pringsheim, née Dohm. She grew up with four brothers in an exceptionally wealthy and educated middle-class liberal environment. Her father was of Jewish origin but did not practice the Jewish faith: while he had his five children baptized as Protestants, he did not convert to Christianity himself.

From 1890 onwards the Pringsheim family lived in a villa on Arcisstraße 12 which up until the First World War was an important meeting place for well-known political and cultural figures such as Walther Rathenau and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

In 1901 Katia became the first woman to pass her secondary school leaving examination (Abitur) in Munich, and on request she was permitted to attend lectures at Munich University in the subjects of mathematics and philosophy – women were not admitted to university in Bavaria on a regular basis until 1903. In the spring of 1904 she met Thomas Mann: the author had moved to Munich in 1894 and had celebrated his first major success as a freelance writer in 1901 with his novel Buddenbrooks. The couple married in Munich in February 1905 and moved

into an apartment not far from Katia’s parents’ house. Their first daughter Erika was born in November 1905, followed by five more children over the course of the next 14 years – Klaus, Golo, Monika, Elisabeth and Michael. The Manns moved into a villa at Poschingerstraße 1 in Herzogpark in 1914, and from 1912 onwards Katia Mann went to Swiss lung sanatoriums for treatment on a number of occasions for several months at a time.

Her husband’s income declined after the end of the First World War: domestic staff had to be laid off, and the country house in Bad Tölz which they had purchased in 1908 had to be sold. But the family remained financially secure throughout these years and were even able to purchase a vacation home on the Curonian Spit, not least thanks to Thomas Mann winning the Nobel Prize in 1929,

Katia Mann primarily looked after the family and ran an open house with numerous guests from the worlds of art, literature and music, including Hermann Hesse, Frank Wedekind, Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler and Wilhelm Furtwängler. During the years of the Weimar Republic she also accompanied her husband on lecture tours.
After the National Socialists came to power, the couple’s villa in Munich was confiscated and a protective custody order was issued against Thomas Mann. The couple first fled to the south of France and then to Küsnacht in Switzerland, where their children gradually arrived as well. Thanks to their foreign assets, the family were virtually able to maintain the same standard of living as before. Thomas Mann resumed his reading trips in 1934, also traveling to the USA: his wife accompanied him on several occasions. As opponents of National Socialism even before 1933, the family was stripped of their German citizenship in 1936.
In February 1938 the Manns moved to the USA for good and lived there until 1952. Katia Mann’s father died in exile in Zurich in 1941, her mother six months later. She received news of the death of both her parents in California, where the Manns had moved in April 1941. Katia and Thomas Mann were not granted American citizenship until June 1944.

Not least in view of the accusations and attacks on him by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Thomas Mann and his family sensed an increasingly urgent desire to return to Europe at the end of the 1940s.

Katia and Thomas Mann arrived in Zurich with their daughter Erika in June 1952, moving into a house in Kilchberg overlooking Lake Zurich in 1954. Thomas Mann died on August 12, 1955 in Zurich cantonal hospital as a result of arteriosclerosis. He was buried at Kilchberg cemetery.

Katia Mann continued to live at the house in Kilchberg with her eldest daughter Erika, who managed the literary estate of her father and her brother Klaus. Katia Mann was granted Swiss citizenship in November 1962. Erika died of a brain tumor in 1969; having suffered from dementia for years, her mother died on April 25, 1980. She was buried in the family grave in Kilchberg.