No field is as fertile for an artist as family. Whether a family is mainly happy or unhappy (sorry, Tolstoy), it is always a source of complex complications, neurotic battles, psychological tragedy, pleasure and sadness, war and peace. In the context of this section and this section dedicated to the family, you could refer to countless books, plays, operas or films by King Oedipus until The Lionheart Brothersby Don Giovanni until Toni Erdmann.
That arbitrariness emerges Die Manns – Ein Jahrhundertroman on. This three-part docudrama series (2001) by Heinrich Breloer shows the history of a family that decisively influenced German culture of the last century. The focus is on the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and the couple Thomas and Katia Mann with their six children.
Without Thomas, the writer who drew so ruthlessly from his own family history (and who received the Nobel Prize for his Buddenbrookssubtitle: Decline of a family) and did not hesitate to let a character clearly based on his favorite grandchild die a painful death in Dr. Faustus (“how could you?” asked his English translator in shock) – without Thomas Mann the series would never have been made. But the true star is his daughter Elisabeth who is “still alive,” as the narrator introduces her.
Elisabeth is the youngest daughter, the darling in this family full of likes and dislikes. She talks about how much she loved that one spot on the back of her father’s head. How her father once jokingly pretended not to notice that as a toddler she had crawled into his chair at the head of the table, how he had supposedly thoughtlessly sat on top of her, and wondered what kind of strange seat cushion that was, that made such sounds.
But besides such touching admiration for ‘der Zauberer‘, as his children called him, Breloer also shows through archive footage and re-enacted scenes how crushing the supremacy of this father was. From his sacred daily afternoon nap to his otherwise writing-filled day, not a sound was allowed in the house. “Then no one answers the phone,” he barked through a crack in the door when the ringing lasted too long.
The youngest son Michael, who never lived up to his father’s eyes, was afraid of crucifixes. After which his father decreed that a crucifix should be hung above Michael’s bed, to get used to it. When the boy once breaks a Christmas angel while decorating the tree, his father grumbles: “What is that boy actually doing here?” Michael would later kill himself, and he wasn’t the only Mann child to do so.
In an interview, filmmaker Breloer explains to daughter Monika Mann that her father once said: “Someone like me should actually remain childless” – referring to his homoerotic feelings, which he also projected onto his eldest son. “Well, he should have thought of that earlier,” Monika jokes. “But he needed us. He would never have achieved all this without his family.”