My News Service

After 1933 the Pringsheims from Munich, once a prominent family in social, cultural and material terms, were placed under National Socialist restrictions. In 375 letters written to her daughter Katia Mann, who had left Germany in 1933 with her husband Thomas, Hedwig Pringsheim defies the injustice she witnesses around her, and to which she is personally subjected. She writes in encoded messages with abundant literary, musical and historical allusions. Despite their witty candour, her letters are literally sealed.

The mother Hedwig Pringsheim’s »News Service« (15.10.1934) gives us a unique insight into life in Munich during the first years of the Nazi dictatorship. The loss of Katia Mann’s replies is largely compensated by entries in Thomas Mann’s diaries. The decoding and detailed commentary of this unique document humain was undertaken with the aid of information from Hedwig Pringsheim’s diary and newly discovered letters from and to Thomas, Katia and Erika Mann and Klaus and Peter Pringsheim.


Thomas Mann’s mother-in-law provides a unique testimony to the destruction of the Jewish upper classes in Munich during the Nazi era.


Hedwig Pringsheim
(1855 –1942), daughter of the famous feminist Hedwig Dohm, wife of the mathematics professor and art patron Alfred Pringsheim and mother of Katia Mann (1883 –1980), who married Thomas Mann in 1905.

The Editor
Dirk Heißerer, born in 1957, is a literary specialist and non-fiction writer and lives in Munich. He is the president of the Thomas Mann Forum Munich e.V. and was awarded the Thomas Mann Medal in 2009.