A lecture at the Getty Center gave a glimpse of what “he” meant: Marcelo Suárez-Orozco, an expert on immigration from Los Angeles University, and German sociologist Jutta Ohlmendinger, one of the first Thomas Mann Fellows, shared statistics on immigration in Germany and the US, suggesting that underlying desires and fears are closer than they appear. On Monday, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier opened the Mann House as a residence for German scholars and artists. While the Marshall Plan gave Germany a fresh economic and moral start, Thomas Mann, “his” friends, exiles, artists, intellectuals, “his” own children Erica, Klaus and Golo, and finally himself, have become targets for zealous McCarthy Communist hunters in California. Steinmeier sees the Thomas Mann House as the place to hold a debate about the Democratic future. Stephen Lavin, former president of CalArts, who is the founding director of the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles, gave me a tour of the house. Friedo told me “he” felt a strange form of control at the meetings on San Remo Drive, I saw people looking at me – There “he” is, the guy. It wasn’t easy for Thomas Mann to become a fiction writer. Steinmeier continued: “Only in America did Thomas Mann seem to go from a Democrat of the mind to a Democrat of the heart. In the living room where Mann once listened to “his” Wagner recordings, I asked Friedo about Mann’s war novel Dr. Faustus, about genius and madness, in which Friedo plays the role of an angelic, doomed boy named Nepomuk Schneidevine. One of them asked: “So Thomas Mann is an architect? I tried to explain briefly who Mann was and recommended Mario and the Magician, “his” 1929 story about a Nazi hypnotist who manipulates crowds. But, as Steinmeier noted – and as Wage notes in “his” book Thomas Mann is an American – Mann died an American citizen. But, as scholar Hans Rudolf Wage notes, Mann is no longer an accepted reference in American literary circles, though “his” reputation continues to grow in Germany. Thomas Mann lived at 1550 San Remo Drive in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. The questions Mann asked himself in exile in California – What is the future of democracy? Can the civilized world contain the forces of irrationalism? When the Mann House was put up for sale in 2016, there were fears that a buyer would tear it down. It was good to hear the head of state speak in an intellectual register, with references not only to Mann but also to Kant, Whitman and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. At Mann House, the two young Americans standing next to me were not sure who was celebrating.