Thomas Mann and Switzerland

"Switzerland? I love her!" as Thomas Mann noted back in 1923. One of his grandmothers, Elisabeth Marti, was Swiss. He had travelled to Switzerland as a young man himself and even spent his honeymoon with his wife Katia in Zurich in 1905.

However, Zurich would also become the key to his survival in the run-up to the Second World War: Thomas Mann was exiled in Küsnacht from 1933 to 1938, where he established important friendships. These included with Zurich-based publisher Emil Oprecht, who courageously published the author's political stance against National Socialism as "Bonner Briefwechsel" following the revocation of Mann's citizenship by the German Reich. When the latter annexed Austria, Mann emigrated to the USA.

He chose Switzerland again when he returned to Europe in the 1950s. He died here at Zurich Kantonsspital on 12 August 1955 and was buried at the cemetery in Kilchberg, his final home. "The wish he expressed in a letter to René Schickele in 1934 was fulfilled: 'I want to be buried in Switzerland.'" (Richard Schweizer: Zürich als Stätte des Thomas Mann-Archivs, in: BlTMG 3 (1962), 19).