![]() ![]() Despite Hitler being sworn in as chancellor four weeks into the run, the show was so successful it outgrew its premises, earning a transfer to a larger venue. On New Year’s Day 1933, Mann opened a cabaret in Munich called Die Pfeffermühle, ‘The Pepper Mill’, which lampooned the Nazis in a series of revue skits and songs in a venue next door to the Party headquarters.įor two months Nazi staffers heard laughter and applause at their expense coming through the wall. For all their anti-Semitism and bullying, had she not defeated their warped ideology in court? Germany, she felt, was still a democracy where words held power over actions. While Mann was concerned by the growing danger of the Nazi cause she had right on her side. Yet these were still relatively early days and the Nazis, for all the abhorrence of their rhetoric and violence of their actions, were regarded in some quarters as a minority force wearing ridiculous uniforms unlikely to get anywhere near significant power. It seems almost wincingly naïve now that Mann believed satire and the courts were an effective way to repel the growing tide of fascism. “It touched at the very foundation of my, of our, of the existence of all.”Ī year later she opened a satirical cabaret. ![]() “I realised that my experience had nothing to do with politics, this was more than politics,” she wrote. When the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter reported on the incident and called Mann a “flatfooted peace hyena” who “possessed no human physiognomy” she sued – and won. “The stormtroopers attacked the audience with chairs, shouting themselves into paroxysms of anger and fury.” “In the hall everything became a mad scramble,” she wrote later. The men proved to be SAs, stormtroopers, members of the Sturmabteilung, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. “Jewish traitor! International agitator!” She had barely begun when a group of men at the back of the hall began shouting her down. Mann’s first direct experience came in January 1932 when, having forged a reputation as an actor and writer that extended beyond German borders, she was invited by a Munich women’s group to read a poem by Victor Hugo at an anti-war meeting. Unconventional parenting it might have been, but the incident helped forge an unconventional life spent attempting to combat injustice wherever she found it. ![]()
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