1942 - 1955

Thomas Mann becomes an American citizen in 1943. Nelly Mann remains an outsider in the Mann family and becomes more and more addicted to alcohol. In December 1944 she poisoned herself with pills. Klaus Mann tries to get out of his personal misery by enlisting in the US Army and being assigned to Europe. In 1949, Thomas Mann embarked on his first trip to Europe after World War II with his wife Katia and daughter Erika. Against Erika's resistance, he also visits Germany. Klaus Mann died on May 21, 1949 in Cannes from an overdose of sleeping pills. Heinrich Mann was unexpectedly invited to move to East Berlin as President of the Academy of Arts, but he died on March 12, 1950 – a few days before his planned departure. When the American Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy (1909 - 1957) organized a hysterical persecution of potential communists and their sympathizers, Katia and Thomas Mann left the USA in 1952 and moved back to Switzerland. Thomas Mann died there on August 12, 1955 at the age of 80.