Thomas Mann House Events
Navid Kermani: In Search of a Common Cause. Conversations Across the U.S.
Info
Together with the Goethe-Institut in North America, the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles convenes an extensive transatlantic lecture tour and series of conversations with the acclaimed German writer Navid Kermani to explore how we can build and maintain solidarity among seemingly opposing identities, groups, and geopolitical alliances.
Navid Kermani, one of Germany’s most acclaimed writers and “among the most thoughtful intellectual voices in German today,” according to the New York Review of Books, recently visited some of the world’s major conflict zones, not as a political analyst, but as a literary observer. Together with various U.S. intellectuals and writers, Kermani will discuss: What does it mean to be a writer in a polarized world marked by war, displacement, and political division? How is the concept of “the West” changing? How might literature, poetry, and religion serve as bridges in fractured societies and foster solidarity? These events bring together acclaimed thinkers from both sides of the Atlantic for a conversation on literature, politics, and spirituality at a moment of profound global change.
Polyphony is the elixir of Kermani's international renown: his encounters with times and worlds, in an age of increasing isolation, defend the idea that the world is more than everything that is the case. They defend the existence of something entirely different—the unexpected, the unheard of, and the supposedly lost. For Kermani's thinking, and this is often overlooked, possesses the power of the pariah, that outsider who has understood that one can use one's own dual belonging to one's advantage, both for oneself and for others.
- Marie Luise Knott, Deutschlandfunk
Navid Kermani has established himself as one of Germany’s foremost public intellectuals. The child of Iranian immigrants, he has spoken of himself as belonging, like Heine or Goethe, to a tradition of German cosmopolitanism, open to the world and critical towards the nation.
- Times Literary Supplement
Conversations
In Search of a Common Cause: A Conversation with Krista Tippett and Navid Kermani
Location: Los Angeles Central Library, Los Angeles
Navid Kermani in conversation with Krista Tippett, author and award–winning host of the renowned podcast On Being.
More information here.
An Evening With Navid Kermani - A Literary Salon
Location: Goethe-Institut Los Angeles
Reading & Discussion: Friederike von Schwerin-High in Conversation with Navid Kermani.
Focusing on his literary works, Navid Kermani offers an intimate reading of excerpts from a selection of his texts in German, accompanied by the English translation, including Das Buch der von Neil Young Getöteten (The Book of Those Killed by Neil Young), Zürich 2002, and Große Liebe | Love Writ Large (2014), among others. English passages from Kemani's works will be presented by actor Moneer Yaqubi. Interweaving readings with thought-provoking discussion, Kermani and von Schwerin-High will explore themes of love, faith, loss, aesthetics, and music as present in Kermani’s diverse body of work.
More information here.
Navid Kermani in conversation with Jaron Lanier
Location: Goethe-Institut San Francisco
A conversation on the intersections of literature, technology, and democracy in contemporary society.
More information here.
Navid Kermani in conversation with Andrea Bajani
Location: Rice University - Kraft Hall, Houston, TX
A conversation on what it means to be a writer in a polarized world and how to build bridges in fractured societies and foster solidarity.
More information here.
Navid Kermani in conversation with Anna Parkinson
The Burden of the Past: The Holocaust, Colonialism, and Today's World
Talk and Community Dinner: A public lecture by Navid Kermani, one of Germany's most acclaimed writers, followed by a conversation and communal meal.
In this lecture in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Navid Kermani, in conversation with German Studies scholar Anna Parkinson, will discuss the status of memory culture in contemporary Germany and its role in a pluralistic society. Afterwards, all are invited to continue the discussion over a vegetarian community dinner by chef Adrian Ricardo Castellano featuring produce sourced from local urban farms.
Location: Goethe-Institut Chicago
More information here.
Navid Kermani in Conversation with Omri Boehm
Location: Goethe-Institut New York
Join the Goethe-Institut New York for a special evening featuring award‑winning German author and public intellectual Navid Kermani in conversation with Omri Boehm, Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy at The New School. These two prominent thinkers will discuss how current global conflict and political division are reshaping public life.
More information here.
Navid Kermani in Conversation with Jeffrey Gedmin
Location: Goethe-Institut Washington
More information here.
Location: Goethe-Institut Boston
More information soon.
Participants
Navid Kermani is an independent German writer living in Cologne. He studied Middle Eastern Studies, Philosophy, and Theater in Cologne, Cairo, and Bonn, where he received the post-doctoral degree (“Habilitation”). For his literary and academic work, he was awarded numerous prices, including the Hannah-Arendt-Prize, the Kleist-Prize, the Joseph-Breitbach-Preis, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Hölderlin-Prize and the Thomas Mann-Prize.
His literary books are published by Carl Hanser Verlag (German) and Seagull Books (English), his academic and non-fictional works by C. H. Beck (German) and Polity Press (English).
Partner
An event series by the Goethe-Institut in North America in cooperation with the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles, and other U.S. partners.
Exhibition "Democracy Will Win!" at University of Nevada
University of Nevada
Information
Join the Department of World Languages and Cultures at University of Nevada for the traveling exhibition "Thomas Mann: Democracy Will Win!"
The exhibition commemorates the series of lecture tours that the Nobel Laureate conducted throughout the Unites States from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s. The first of these tours began at Northwestern University, where more than 4000 people came to hear him speak about the fundamental reasons for liberal democracy. “It is a terrible spectacle when the irrational becomes popular,” Mann said in a speech at the Library of Congress in 1943, and he drew on his considerable powers of thought and expression to counter the sources of this spectacle through his confident motto: “Democracy will win.”
The like-named exhibit is divided into two parts: the first charts the changes in Mann’s political views, while the second connects Mann’s lectures tours to current political situations in both Europe and the United States.
Partner
The traveling exhibition Thomas Mann: Democracy Will Win! is a collaboration between the Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Nevada, and the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles.
Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis: Beyond the Biographical Illusion
Thomas Mann House (1550 N San Remo Drive, CA 90272)
Language: English ・ By Invitation Only
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Join us and the USC Max Kade Institute in the living room of the Thomas Mann House for a lecture by historian of science Andreas Mayer, research professor at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and currently visiting professor at the University of Southern California.
Since the foundation of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud has been a figure of enduring fascination and irritation alike. A vast “Freud industry” of biographies, novels, films, and television series has continuously returned to Freud’s life, often seeking to extract broader lessons from the Viennese physician’s personality and private experiences. The result is a contradictory image: Freud is both admired and idealized, while at the same time his ideas are often challenged by scrutinizing his personal life. This long-standing focus on Freud the person has shaped how the history of psychoanalysis is told.
In this insightful lecture, Andreas Mayer examines the historical and epistemic reasons for this fixation and asks how the history of psychoanalysis might be written beyond what he terms the “biographical illusion.”
Participants
Andreas Mayer is a historian of science and research professor at the CNRS affiliated to the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 2025-2026 he serves as the Dornsife/EHESS visiting professor at the University of Southern California. He has received many awards and fellowships (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2019-2020; Villa I Tatti, Florence, 2024-2025) and has published extensively on the history of the human sciences and of psychoanalysis, most notably, Dreaming by the Book: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (with Lydia Marinelli, New York, 2003), Sites of the Unconscious: Hypnosis and the Emergence of the Psychoanalytic Setting (Chicago, 2013), and The Science of Walking. Investigations Into Locomotion in the Long Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 2020). His most recent book is entitled Freud gegen den Strich (Berlin, 2026). Photo: Andreas Mayer.
Partner
This event is a collaboration with the USC Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies.
The Truth of Populism: Facts, Fiction, and Truisms in Contemporary Politics
Thomas Mann House (1550 N San Remo Drive, CA 90272)
Sprache: Englisch ・ Teilnahme nur auf Einladung.
Info
Join us in the living room of the Thomas Mann House for a lively conversation between Adrian Daub, literary scholar and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Stanford University, and Thomas Mann Fellow Nils Kumkar, whose research focuses on political conflict, social inequality, digitalization, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories.
In their conversation, the two acclaimed scholars will examine why “truth” has become such a central and contested issue in contemporary political discourse in both the United States and Germany. Approaching the topic from multiple disciplinary perspectives, the discussion will range from concerns about fake news, declining trust in media and journalism, as well as so-called “alternative facts,” to the broader crises of political legitimacy, conspiracy theories, and anxieties surrounding hybrid warfare in Europe. They will explore how populism both produces its own truths while exposing what might be called public open secrets at the same time. Against this backdrop, the evening probes a more fundamental question: is “truth” itself even the most appropriate category for understanding what is at stake in today’s political conflicts? What we are really arguing about when we argue over “truth”?
Participants
Adrian Daub is a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, and the director of Stanford’s Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His research focuses on the intersection of literature, music, and philosophy in the nineteenth century, and he is the author of several books published by academic presses. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, n+1, Longreads, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Among his most recent book are The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global (Stanford University Press, 2024) and What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley (FSG Originals x Logic, 2020).
"Sliced Memories"- Solo exhibition by Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova
Thomas Mann House (1550 N San Remo Drive, CA 90272)
Language: English ・ By Invitation Only
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In collaboration with Kyiv to LA, the Thomas Mann House presents Sliced Memories, a solo exhibition by Ukrainian artist-in-residence Zhanna Kadyrova. As part of an ongoing partnership supporting Ukrainian artists through a Los Angeles-based residency, this exhibition marks Kadyrova’s first solo presentation in the United States and coincides with the four-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Sliced Memories brings Kadyrova’s anti-war practice in dialogue with Thomas Mann, whose history of political resistance raises enduring questions about the role of art in times of crisis. Centered around the artist's fundraising project Palianytsia, the exhibition features artworks from her Anxiety, Refugee, and Russian Rocket series, which reveal the surreal experience of encountering the unfamiliar within the familiar. Presented one year after the devastating fires that ravaged the surrounding Pacific Palisades and neighboring Altadena, and four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this exhibition invites viewers to consider how art and resilience are intimately intertwined. Linking Mann’s anti-fascist radio addresses to Kadyrova’s recent bodies of work, Sliced Memories foregrounds the asterisks and annotations that emerge when creative practices are restructured as forms of resistance.
Zhanna Kadyrova (b.1981, Brovary, Ukraine) is an interdisciplinary artist and member of “R.E.P.” group (Revolution Experimental Space). After graduating from the Taras Shevchenko State Art School in 1999, she received the Kazimir Malevich Artist Award and the Grand Prix of the Kyiv Sculpture Project (both 2012). She was awarded the Special Prize (2011), Main Prize (2013), and Special Prize – Future Generation International (2014), all from PinchukArtCentre.
Kadyrova’s practice engages various disciplines including sculpture, photo, video, and performance. In her work, the issue of context unravels to reveal the rhythm of History on the move - that of a world whose multiple layers disappear behind their immediacy. Often diverting the aesthetic canons of the socialist ideal still present in the heritage of contemporary Ukraine, Kadyrova’s perspective is partially informed by the plastic and symbolic values of urban building materials. Thus ceramics, glass, stone, and concrete enter the spotlight of her work.
About the Artist
Partner
This exhibition is part of an ongoing collaboration with Kyiv to LA. Kyiv to LA is made possible by a generous grant from Nora McNeely Hurley and the Manitou Fund.
Exhibition Curator: Asha Bukojemsky
Exhibition Assistant: Marina Shishkina
Gallery support managed by Lia Sisnarenko, Art Access Gallery
Émigré vs Exile Modernism and Architecture in L.A.
Thomas Mann House (1550 N San Remo Drive, CA 90272)
Language: English ・ By Invitation Only
Info
Join us in the living room of the Thomas Mann House for an insightful conversation between Volker M. Welter, an architectural historian specializing in modern architecture at UC Santa Barbara, and The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, whose research explores German-speaking émigrés and exiles in California and their influence on music, literature, architecture, and the arts in Los Angeles.
When influential German Studies scholar Erhard Bahr remarked in his seminal book Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism, that the architects Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra “were, strictly speaking, immigrants rather than exiles,” the historian established the year 1933 as a significant caesura separating “immigrant modernism” from “exile modernism” in California. Many German-speaking professionals already immigrated to California in the 1920s and earlier to pursue careers and progressive ideas of modernism before the Nazis even came into power. The exiles, such as Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, or Bertolt Brecht, who arrived in California as refugees after 1933, often had a much different and less enthusiastic understanding of modernism after their traumatic experience in Germany.
When architectural history ponders the works and influence of German-speaking, Central European architects in Southern California, a much simpler trajectory is often discussed: Schindler and Neutra brought modernist architecture to California when the two came to the U.S. Subsequently, other German-speaking architects working in architecture in the Los Angeles area are evaluated in comparison with the two “masters.“ In sharp contrast, the works of those exiled architects who fled to California after 1933 are rarely considered at all. Recent scholarship on these architects suggests that distinguishing, analogous to Bahr, between immigrant architects and exile architects allows an astonishingly differentiated picture of the impact of German-speaking architects on Southern California to emerge.
In their conversation, Welter and Ross will explore the nuances around different concepts of modernism in California before 1945, as these transatlantic currents and theoretical frameworks did not only leave their mark on architecture, but can also be seen, discussed, and exemplified in film, music, literature, and the visual arts.
Participants
