Julia Mann Thomas Mann’s Brazilian Mom

Even after years of negotiations, the project for a cultural center at the former Boa Vista Plantation in Paraty, where Julia Mann was born, remains uncertain. Experts have noted that Julia had a greater impact on Thomas’s and Heinrich’s lives than German literary critics have revealed, underlining the importance of an institution dedicated to the Manns in Brazil.
 

A few days after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Thomas Mann was interviewed by Brazilian historian and sociologist Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. The interview was published in January 1930 in O Jornal. When asked by the then young reporter about his family’s Brazilian roots, the German novelist replied: “Actually, Brazil brings back some delightful memories of my childhood and youth. I remember that my mom, who was Brazilian and was born on a plantation, coffee or sugar, I don’t remember which, used to talk a lot with me about how beautiful the Bay of Guanabara was.”

Thomas Mann was probably referring to the Paraty Bay, on the banks of which the Boa Vista Sugar Mill still stands today. Built in the 18th century in colonial style, the property surrounded by the sea and by the Atlantic Forest is part of the listed complex of the city of Paraty. It was there that Julia Mann, born Julia da Silva Bruhns in 1851, spent the first years of her life. When she was seven, she emigrated to Lübeck with her German father, after being orphaned by her Brazilian mother.

In northern German city, she received a traditional education, married the senator and businessman Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann and gave birth to five children—two of whom, Heinrich and Thomas, would enter into the German literary canon of the 20th century. Julia moved her residence to Munich after her husband’s death and never returned to Brazil, but the memories of her tropical childhood “among monkeys and parrots” were recorded in her posthumously published Aus Dodos Kindheit (From Dodo’s Childhood).

“As if It Were Something Regrettable or Shameful”

For decades, the German intelligentsia in Germany ignored the Mann brothers’ Brazilian origins, as Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda pointed out in an article in 1930: “The well-known literary historian, Adolf Bartels, denies this assumption, as if it were something regrettable or shameful.” It was only in the 1990s that writer and psychologist Frido Mann, known for being Thomas’s “favorite grandson,” became interested in his great-grandmother’s story while doing research for his novel Brasa, published in 1999 and inspired by the family’s Brazilian roots.

After visiting Paraty, he nurtured his dream of turning the Boa Vista Sugar Mill mansion into a cultural center. In 1996, Frido Mann founded the Thomas Mann Cultural Center Association in Zurich and a year later produced a festival in the city of Rio de Janeiro in honor of Julia Mann, with exhibitions, lectures and the participation of Brazilian artists. Conflicts of interest and legal issues involving the then owners of the mansion, however, hindered the cultural center project, and Frido gave up on the plan.

Neither Thomas nor his brother Heinrich ever set foot in Brazil, but both related to the country in their own way. Thomas, in a more subtle way, made constant references in his works to the “South” and to foreign characters. “Thomas Mann repressed his Brazilian origins for many years. He did not want to lose his place as the prince of German poets,” comments Paulo Soethe, a professor in the graduate program in Literature at Federal University of Paraná and author of the book Terra mátria: a família de Thomas Mann e o Brasil (Motherland: Thomas Mann’s Family and Brazil), written in collaboration with Karl-Josef Kuschel and Frido Mann. “From 1938 onwards, in exile in the United States, Thomas became a staunch opponent of Nazi-fascism and began to look more closely at Latin America. He met Brazilian writer Érico Veríssimo and corresponded with European intellectuals who were exiled in Brazil during World War II,” he says.

The Brazilian heritage

In 1943, he wrote a letter to one of those exiles, Austrian playwright Karl Lustig-Prean: “I have always been aware of the Latin-American blood that runs through my veins, and I feel how much I owe to it as an artist. Only a certain clumsy, conservative corpulence in my life explains why I have not yet visited Brazil. The loss of my homeland should be one more reason for me to get to know my mother’s country. That time will come, I hope.”

In Heinrich Mann’s case, his Brazilian heritage emerges more explicitly. In 1907, Julia’s oldest son published Zwischen den Rassen (Between the Races), a fictional work inspired by the matriarch’s memoirs. “It is a very interesting novel about a woman seeking emancipation and the right to divorce her authoritarian, conservative husband,” Soethe reveals.

In January 2024, the year of the centenary of The Magic Mountain, then mayor of Paraty, Luciano Vidal, made an official trip to Lübeck looking for partners interested in preserving the Mann family legacy—without concrete results. The same year, the Paraty International Literary Festival (FLIP) hosted the traveling exhibition Thomas Mann: A democracia há de vencer (Thomas Mann: Democracy Must Win), conceived by the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles, in cooperation with the House of Literature in Munich, whose Brazilian version was curated by Soethe. The Casa da Cultura in Paraty held literary roundtables with debates about the Manns. No literary events took place, however, a few kilometers from the historic center in the Boa Vista Sugar Mill mansion.

Property with an Uncertain Future

In 2025, as we celebrate the 150th anniversary of Tomas Mann’s birth and 70 years since his death, the future of the house remains uncertain. The property currently belongs to navigator Amyr Klink, who was the first man to row across the South Atlantic in 1984. After being in a calamitous state for years, as reported by the national press, the house was renovated by Klink and inspected by the National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (Iphan) in 2023. Klink’s advisory council, who also owns a luxurious marina on the land, said that he and his partners are “open to possible proposals” from those interested in sponsoring and developing the institution’s collection.

If that were to come to fruition, the project for a cultural center in Julia Mann’s home in Paraty would join other worldwide institutions that preserve the family’s history, such as the Tomas Mann House in Los Angeles, the Buddenbrookhaus/ Heinrich and Thomas Mann Center in Lübeck, the Monacensia im Hildebrandhaus in Munich, the Thomas Mann Archive at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, and the Thomas Mann Cultural Center in Nida, Lithuania.

Keeping the Family’s Memory Alive

“If the physical house where Julia lived is not available, we will organize colloquia in other spaces to keep the family’s memory alive,” says Johannes Kretschmer, a professor of German literature at Fluminense Federal University in Niterói. Kretschmer draws a parallel between the case of Julia Mann and that of Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer of Jewish origin, who sought refuge from the Nazi regime in Petrópolis (RJ) during World War II. The residence where Zweig lived and died is now a museum open to visitors. “Just like Petrópolis, which took some time to understand the importance of Stefan Zweig, Paraty is also missing out on an opportunity to attract cultural tourism,” according to Kretschmer, who organises colloquia and readings in the city.

“Critics in Germany and around the world are paying increasing attention to the issue of Thomas and Heinrich Mann’s Brazilian origins. It would be important to have an institution dedicated to the Manns in Brazil, because Julia had a much greater impact on the lives of both writers than was previously thought. And Thomas has a significant readership in Brazil, numerically speaking,” Soethe concludes.