Thomas Mann House

Designed by the architect Julius Ralph Davidson, the house at 1550 San Remo Drive was built in 1941/42. In 2016, it was acquired by the German federal government, and opened on June 18, 2018, as a place for transatlantic dialogue and debate. The Thomas Mann House is in the Riviera neighborhood of Pacific Palisades, a community in the Westside of Los Angeles. During the Nazi era, some German Jews fleeing persecution and the Holocaust found refuge in California, and especially the Pacific Palisades area became a refuge and a center for German Jewish culture, and was home to many artists, writers, and intellectuals, as well as others. Pacific Palisades is also home to the Villa Aurora, the residence of Jewish refugee Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife since 1943. While staying in the Brentwood neighborhood in the summer of 1940, Thomas and his Jewish wife Katia Mann decided to move to California. In 1941, they rented a house above Santa Monica Canyon. That same year, they bought a 1.5-acre (0.61 ha) property in the neighboring community of Pacific Palisades, which was part of a lemon plantation.