Beteiligt Euch – es geht um Eure Erde. Die Kabarettistin, Kriegskorrespondentin und politische Rednerin Erika Mann im Kampf gegen den Nationalsozialismus

In the organizer's words:

She had actually wanted to become an actress - and in the 1920s, she actually managed a remarkable career in this profession. She also took part in a car rally across Europe organized by the German Automobile Club, won first prize, wrote amusing feature articles for the Berlin daily newspaper Tempo along the way and also became famous with a children's book.

However, the rise of the National Socialists and the transfer of power to Adolf Hitler very quickly turned the spoiled daughter of a famous father into a determined fighter against barbarism and for democracy. She made headlines in Munich in January 1933 with her own cabaret ("Die Pfeffermühle"). In exile in Switzerland, she continued her cabaret fight against National Socialism. The difficulties that had to be overcome and the new forms of journalistic engagement against National Socialist Germany that Erika Mann ultimately developed in exile in America from 1937 onwards - the lecture aims to provide information about all of this using texts, images and sounds.

Irmela von der Lühe is Professor Emeritus of Modern German Literature at the Free University of Berlin and has been Senior Professor at the Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg since 2013. Her research and teaching focuses on German-Jewish literary and cultural history, exile and Shoah literature, the history of female authorship and the work and environment of the Mann family.

In 2009, Rowohlt Verlag published her revised and expanded biography "Erika Mann. A Life Story". Together with Uwe Naumann, she also edited Erika Mann's writings. In 2019, she curated the first comprehensive solo exhibition on Erika Mann ("Erika Mann. Kabarettistin, Kriegskorrespondentin, Politische Rednerin") at the Monacensia in Munich. The exhibition was subsequently also shown at the German National Library in Frankfurt am Main and at the Goethe Institute in Prague.

A joint event by the Gerhart Hauptmann House Foundation, the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation Düsseldorf e.V., Düsseldorf contributions "Respect and Courage" as part of the "100 Heads of Democracy" project of the Federal President Theodor Heuss House Foundation