Julia Mann- Borghese
The Costa Verde in Brazil is the home of Thomas and Heinrich Mann’s mother. In 1851, Julia was born in the sultry jungle air of Paraty, a small town about 250 km south of Rio de Janeiro, which is now completely protected as a historic monument. She lived there for only 7 years, but had vivid memories of that emerald place by the sea all her life. “Among monkeys and parrots” she grew up, she later wrote. Her father had emigrated from Lübeck to Paraty at the age of 19 and had made his fortune there as a successful merchant. Julia’s happy childhood ended when her mother Dona Maria Luiza died giving birth to her sixth child. The father decided to go back to Germany with the children, a decision that meant a drastic change for the children.
Culture shock and Lübeck-style food
From the eternal summer to Lübeck in northern Germany, where no one spoke Portuguese, there were no slaves, no palm trees and no wealth, and the customs and traditions were as foreign as the unfamiliar food. Julia’s great-grandson Frido Mann reports that Julia mistook the snow falling from the sky for sugar during her first winter in Lübeck.
Julia was sent to a boarding school, quickly learned not only High German, but also Low German, English and French, and at the age of 18 married the Lübeck senator Johann Thomas Heinrich Mann.
Lifelong longing for the south
The musically gifted and literary interested mother gave her inner world to her daughters and especially to the writing sons Thomas and Heinrich. With night songs and short stories, she also awakened the desire to dream and write in Thomas, who memorialized his mother in his 1930 novel “Bild der Mutter.” The ‘cheerful nature’, the artistic sensual direction and – in the broadest sense of the word – the desire to fable’, he got from his mother, wrote 1936.
Julia Mann in the Buddenbrook exhibition at the Behnhaus
During the renovation and expansion work in the Buddenbrookhaus, one of the stations of the exhibition “Buddenbrooks in the Behnhaus Drägerhaus” is dedicated to the exotic mother of the writer brothers and her lifelong love of the South, which she passed on to her children.
