Berlin, 11. Dezember 2024: The Villa Aurora in Los Angeles will once again open its doors to artists from Germany in 2026. In the inspiring atmosphere of this historic site, fellows can work on their projects for three months while engaging in cultural exchange with other creatives. Applications are open until February 27, 2025.

Lübeck, December 3, 2024: In honor of Thomas Mann's 150th birthday next year, Thomas Mann International, a coalition of globally active Thomas Mann institutions, is launching the initiative “Mann 2025: 150 Years of Thomas Mann.”

October 10, 2024: VATMH Night 2024: Music and cultural diplomacy in Berlin

Berlin/Los Angeles, October 9, 2024 - In 2025, fourteen remarkable individuals from the fields of science, media, business, and culture will come together at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles to address issues related to the annual topic “Across Boundaries.”

Los Angeles, February 25, 2024: On the occasion of the historic LA premiere of Alexander Zemlinsky’s The Dwarf at the LA Opera on February 24, 2024, Maestro James Conlon, Richard Seaver Music Director at the LA Opera, convened a conversation about Zemlinsky, the fate of other exiled composers, and the quest to make their voices heard again.

December 13, 2023: The Thomas Mann House has opened its fellowship application process for the year 2025, inviting innovative minds to explore the theme "Across Boundaries."

December 22, 2023: Read the 2023 program highlights of the Villa Aurora, Thomas Mann House, and VATMH Berlin.

November 17-19, 2023: Two-Day Conference on the Role of Artists in Weakened Democracies

April through May 2022 students at UCLA's Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies met with Fellows of the Thomas Mann House in the context of a hybrid seminar organized jointly by the two institutions. The outcome of their individual and collaborative work is a set of public-facing projects shared with communities near and far and during a presentation at the Thomas Mann House in June 2022. The project results that included video interviews, XXXX are also presented below.

Saâdane Afif, Vajiko Chachkhiani, Louisa Clement, Lauren Halsey, Annika Kahrs, Susan Philipsz, Anri Sala, April Street, Thomas Struth, Andrea Zittel

Exhibtion with Saâdane Afif, Vajiko Chachkhiani, Louisa Clement, Lauren Halsey, Johnston Marklee, Annika Kahrs, Susan Philipsz, Anri Sala, April Street, Thomas Struth, Kaari Upson, Andrea Zittel

#MutuallyMann was an interactive reading experience and a space for transatlantic conversation in times of social distancing and quarantine.

"Ein halbes Jahrhundert im Exil - Marta Feuchtwanger erzählt aus ihrem Leben" - Radio-Feature - First broadcast 18.07.1985 - Source: NDR - Author: Marianne Heuwagen

Apply now for a fellowship at the Thomas Mann House of 3 to a maximum of 10 months in 2022.

November 24, 2020

Mit einem Festakt und einem vielseitigen digitalen Kulturprogramm feiert die Künstlerresidenz der Villa Aurora am 1. Dezember ihr 25-jähriges Bestehen.

October 16, 2020

Journalist and Blogger Pham Doan Trang arrested in Vietnam on a charge of alleged “anti-state propaganda.”

July 1, 2020

Berlin/Potsdam/Los Angeles – Berlin-based director Anna Sofie Hartmann is awarded the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg sponsored Villa Aurora Fellowship, for a three-month stay in 2021 at the artists' residence in Los Angeles.

Berlin-based musician Ilgen-Nur receives 2021 fellowship at the Villa Aurora. This is the eighth fellowship awarded by Musicboard Berlin in cooperation with VATMH.

Esa-Pekka Salonen, composer and conductor laureate for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Music Director Designate of the San Francisco Symphony, and The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross hosted an evening of music at the Thomas Mann House.

Applications for Thomas Mann Fellowships in 2021 are open.

Nora Fingscheidt is awarded MFG-Star and will travel to Villa Aurora

Around 450 guests from culture, politics and the media came to the Komische Oper Berlin in mid-November to celebrate the VATMH Night 2019.

Goethe’s Weimar Edition crossed the Atlantic together with Thomas Mann and followed him all the way to Los Angeles. In 1952, the luxury editions left the Pacific Palisades and are now returning home.

Out of 77 applications, the advisory board of the Thomas Mann House selected twelve fellows for a fellowship for the year 2020 in the former L.A. residence of Thomas Mann.

Thomas Mann House sat down with Fellow Lisa Riedner and Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) founder and director Pete White to discuss the global housing crisis through the lens of Los Angeles and Germany.
We found that similar structures and dynamics exist in both places and that houselessness should be regarded as a global crisis.

On May 27 and May 28, Thomas Mann House and UCLA Digital Humanities hosted "Moral Code: Ethics in the Digital Age". The conference with over 150 attendees and participants in total discussed the ethical implications of artificial intelligence.

The Egyptian journalist Hadeer El-Mahdawy is awarded the 2019 Feuchtwanger Fellowship by Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House and the University of Southern California. The fellowship was named after the Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger who had to leave Nazi-Germany in 1933 and lived at Villa Aurora in Los Angeles starting in 1943 until his death in 1958.

The ninth biennial meeting of the International Feuchtwanger Society (IFS) will take place on October 17-20, 2019 in Munich. What role did the “Munich milieu” play for the young intellectual? Which of the impressions and influences of the Munich art, theater and literary scene can be demonstrated? Which networks and connections motivated the ambitious young author? Proposals that are closely related to the conference topic are welcome along with papers that explore Munich’s cultural scene between 1900 and 1925. Papers should not exceed 20 minutes.

For a stay at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles in 2020 Thomas Mann Fellowships are tendered. The fellowships will be awarded for the year 2020 and for a period of 3 to 10 months. The former home of Thomas Mann in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, is a residence house of the Federal Republic of Germany with the aim of stimulating debates on the political, social or cultural situation on both sides of the Atlantic.[Text in German]

On November 29th and 30th, representatives of "Thomas Mann Houses International", a network that curates the heritage of the famous autor, came together in Zürich. The institutions (Lübeck: Buddenbrookhaus, Munich: Monacensia in the Hildebrandhaus, Nidden / Lithuania: Thomas Mann Cultural Center, Pacific Palisades / USA: Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V, Zurich / Switzerland: Thomas Mann Archive of ETH Zurich) first gathered in Lübeck in 2017. The network was doudned in order to enrich and strengthen each other.

In our video blog, Jennifer and Brad Johnson from Johnson Rare Books & Archives give insights on the reconstruction of Thomas Mann's library at his home on San Remo Drive.

Entrepreneur and patron Berthold Leibinger died on October 16, 2018 in Stuttgart/Germany. He was 87 years old. The team and the Board of Directors of Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V. mourn this great loss and wish his family, friends and colleagues much strength.

Wolf von Lojewski, longtime US correspondent and presenter of the ZDF heute-journal, gives his valuable collection of Thomas Mann original editions to the Thomas Mann House.

On September 15th, "Zeige deine Klasse" by Villa Fellow Daniela Dröscher will be available in Bookstore. The book is a clairvoyant portrait of social background. From a radically subjective perspective, Dröscher examines how class affiliation shapes one's own self-image and social interaction to this day, but also how much shame the term is still occupied with.

Villa Fellow Carolina Hellsgård's new film “Endzeit” (Ever After) celebrates its world premiere in the Discovery Program of the prestigious Toronto International Film Festival (Tiff).

The Advisory Council of Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V., which includes representatives from culture, science, civil society and business, has selected the 2019 Thomas Mann House Fellows.

At the end of June, the VATMH-supported conference of Wirtschaftswoche "Morals & Machines" took place in Berlin.

Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. [Nbsp] V. and Literaturhaus Berlin took the annual event in remembrance of the book burning on May 10, 1933 as an opportunity to explore the limits of the sayable together with Linguistics-Professor Anatol Stefanowitsch.

Director, author and Villa Fellow Ulrich Köhler receives his first invitation to the International Film Festival Cannes (May 8th through 19th) with his new film "In My Room". Main producer is Pandora Film Produktion from Cologne. The film is invited to section Un Certain Regard.

Bundeskunsthalle presents works by five recipients of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung's Künstlerförderung, who were Villa Aurora Fellows as well.

Last Saturday night the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW) at the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin gave room to the question borrowed by Kurt Tucholsky “Is language a weapon”. “One could be afraid of language and its effects”, stated Martin Grötschel, President of the Academy, in his welcoming address.

On December 8 and 9 the Berlin Congress on Exile during 1933-1945 titled "Off to Moscow! Travel Reports from the Exile" took place at Literaturhaus Berlin under the direction of Hermann Haarmann (Berlin) and Anne Hartmann (Bochum) with the support of the Prussian Seehandlung Foundation, the Institute for Communication History and Applied Cultural Studies of the Free University Berlin and Villa Aurora   & Thomas Mann House e. V.

At the annual get-together of this and next year's Villa Fellows, we presented "Staahaadler Aff", a composition for percussion and sample pad by Oxana Omelchuk.

Villa Aurora Fellow Jan Wagner was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize on Saturday at the autumn conference of the German Academy of Language and Literature. The 50,000 Euro prize is deemed the highest German literary honor. In his acceptance speech Wagner spoke of Georg Büchner's political and literary writings in which language is no longer "a means to an end".

The author Senthuran Varatharajah from Berlin has been a Fellow at Villa Aurora since the beginning of October. Over the next couple of weeks he will take our Instagram channel for a spin. To start, he answered a few questions.

The journalist Sylke Tempel died on Thursday in an accident caused by the storm "Xavier". In September she was selected to be one of the first Thomas Mann Fellows. Sylke Temple died at the age 54 years.

In 2016, Alwin Lay spent three months at Villa Aurora as a fellow of KunstSalon Cologne. The exhibition TILT & SHIFT at will be Fuhrwerkswaage Kunstraum closely related to his stay.

The Board of Trustees of Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e.V., whose members include representatives of the Federal Foreign Office and the office of the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, has nominated the first group of fellows for the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles

Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House e. V., this year together with the project space 68projects of Galerie Kornfeld Berlin, will once again award the Berlin Fellowship to an outstanding artist from Los Angeles. The choice fell on Sandeep Mukherjee.

The Federal Republic of Germany has acquired the former residence of exiled author and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann in Los Angeles. The artist residence Villa Aurora will be entrusted with the administration of the house. Villa Aurora Chair Markus Klimmer, and Executive Director Annette Rupp, together with Doris Barnett, Member of the German Bundestag, were officially presented the keys.