Thomas Mann's Pacific Palisades Home Is For Sale And It's A HUGE Deal In Germany: LAist

Arguably the most influential German writer of the 20th century, Mann was among the German and Austrian writers and artists who lived in exile in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s. The group - whose presence earned L.A. the nickname "Weimar by the sea" - included Arnold Schoenberg, Theodor Adorno, Bertolt Brecht and Lion Feuchtwanger, among other luminaries. Under the unrelenting California sun, the exiles "transplanted the flower of high Teutonic culture into the gorgeous, uncultivated garden of Southern California," as The New York Times once wrote, and helped make Los Angeles into a burgeoning cultural center. As Erhard Bahr explained in Weimar on the Pacific, "The presence of German exiles shaped the cultural life in Los Angeles, especially in the fields of music, theater and film."