A House Between Two Worlds
In the summer of 1932, Thomas Mann stood for the last time on the veranda of his vacation home in Nidden, gazing out over the Curonian Lagoon. The "Italian view," as he called this vista, which conjured up the image of the Mediterranean when in reality only the brackish waters of the lagoon rippled. For three years, he had found his private Arcadia here, his escape from the darkening reality of Germany. He had no idea, or perhaps he did, that this would be his last summer, that he would never see this blue and red house with the crossed horses' heads on its ridge beam again.
How had he even come to this remote fishing village, which by then was no longer part of Germany? It was one of those coincidences that, in retrospect, prove to be fate. In August 1929, the Goethe Society had invited him to Königsberg. After the readings, he traveled with Katia and their younger children to the fashionable seaside resort of Rauschen. But the noisy bustle of the spa town repelled the writer. At the suggestion of the Austrian consul, they took a side trip to Nida on the Curonian Spit. The journey across the lagoon on a saloon steamer took three hours.
What Thomas Mann found there completely overwhelmed him. "The fantastic world of the shifting dunes," he later raved, "the pine and birch forests inhabited by elk between the lagoon and the Baltic Sea, the wild grandeur of the beach so captivated us that we decided to establish a permanent residence in such a remote location." It was as if he had discovered a piece of the Sahara on the Baltic Sea, an oriental mirage in the Prussian north.
The Dream of a Summer House
With his characteristic blend of determination and Hanseatic thoroughness, Thomas Mann commissioned the Memel architect Herbert Reissmann to build a summer house that same year. He leased the plot of land on the "Mother-in-Law's Hill" from the Lithuanian Forestry Office—because since 1923, Nidden had no longer belonged to Germany, but to Lithuania. A curious circumstance that didn't bother the Nobel laureate, perhaps even intrigued him: a German house on Lithuanian soil, but in a village where German was still spoken more than Lithuanian.
The house blended perfectly into the landscape. With its thatched roof, oxblood-red wood paneling, and bright blue shutters—that famous "Nidden Blue"—it was a prime example of the local fisherman's style. Only the crossed horses' heads on the ridge betrayed its special inhabitant: they symbolized Pegasus, the poet's steed. A study on the upper floor was a given, because for Thomas Mann, holidays meant above all: undisturbed work. Here, overlooking the lagoon, he wrote his monumental tetralogy "Joseph and His Brothers" – a counterpoint to the barbaric age that was dawning.
The Artists' Colony: A German Worpswede on the Baltic Sea
Thomas Mann was neither the first nor the only artist to feel the magical pull of Nidden. As early as the 1890s, the fishing village had developed into one of the most important artists' colonies in Europe. The innkeeper Hermann Blode, an art lover, had opened his hotel in 1867 and soon began accepting paintings as payment for room and board. His "artists' veranda" became a legendary meeting place where, by the light of kerosene lamps, art was discussed late into the night.
The list of painters who flocked to Nidden reads like a who's who of German art: Lovis Corinth had already painted the Nidden cemetery in 1890. Max Pechstein, the great Expressionist, came five times for several months between 1909 and 1939. “Everything is drowning in color,” he wrote enthusiastically, “my brain is filled with nothing but images.” Inspired by Pechstein’s enthusiasm, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff also traveled to Nidden in 1913. Ernst Bischoff-Culm, Ernst Mollenhauer, Carl Knauf – over 200 artists worked in Nidden until 1945.
What attracted them all? It was the light, that peculiar Baltic light that bathed the landscape in surreal colors. It was the archaic, unspoiled nature of the fishing world, the heavy Curonian boats with their enormous brown sails. It was the existential drama of a landscape where water, sand, and sky seemed to merge into a single element.
Summer Weeks: Between Idyllic Relaxation and Work
The three summers Thomas Mann spent with his family in Nidden—1930, 1931, and 1932—were among the happiest of his life. Photographs from that time show a relaxed, almost exuberant man: sitting in the sand in a striped bathing suit with garters, strolling along the beach in a bathrobe, reading in his beloved beach chair—the only one on the entire Curonian Spit, which he had specially brought there.
The daily routine was strictly structured, as always with Thomas Mann. In the morning, a walk in the pine forest, then work upstairs until noon. The afternoons were devoted to reading—mostly books about ancient Egypt for his Joseph novels or Max Weber's writings on the sociology of religion. Interspersed were visits to the beach, boat trips on the Curonian Lagoon, and excursions to the enormous shifting dunes.
It is not recorded whether Thomas Mann actually met Lion Feuchtwanger in Nidden. It would have been possible, as the artists' colony attracted many intellectuals. What is certain is that he immersed himself in a world that seemed paradisiacal to him: he felt "like on a ship," suspended between the elements, removed from political reality.
Nidden Becomes Nida: The Tangled History of a Borderland
The history of Nidden is the history of a place that repeatedly changed nationality without ever truly changing itself. Until 1918, the Curonian Spit belonged to the German Reich, more precisely to East Prussia, specifically to the Memel district. After the Treaty of Versailles, the Memel Territory was separated in 1920 and placed under French administration. On January 10, 1923, while France was occupied with occupying the Ruhr region, Lithuanian irregulars marched into the Memel Territory. Officially, it was an "uprising" of the local population, but in reality, it was a well-planned operation by the Lithuanian government.
Nidden became Nida. The German population—and they constituted the majority in Nidden—received Lithuanian passports but were allowed to retain their language and enjoy a degree of autonomy. A curious state of limbo that would last for sixteen years. Thomas Mann was not particularly bothered by this. On the contrary, this extraterritoriality suited his role as a supranational European.
But the new border, which now ran right across the Curonian Spit, also divided a cultural landscape. South of Nida, Germany, East Prussia, still began. Artists needed a "spa visa" to cross the border. "You were abroad and yet still in Germany," recalled the writer Max Fürst, "because nothing had changed except the uniforms of the few police officers."
The End of the Dream
By the summer of 1932, a different wind was already blowing across the Curonian Spit. The National Socialists had gained a foothold in the Memel Territory. Thomas Mann, who had condemned the attacks on leftists in Königsberg in the Berliner Tageblatt and warned of the "national disease" of National Socialism, became a target. The package the Mann family received that last summer contained a charred copy of "Buddenbrooks"—an unmistakable threat.
When Thomas Mann left Nidden in the autumn of 1932 to embark on a lecture tour through Switzerland, he perhaps sensed what was to come. In February 1933, while he was in southern France, his eldest children, Klaus and Erika, telegraphed him, advising him against returning to Germany. His exile had begun. He never saw the house in Nidden again.
The painter Ernst Mollenhauer, Hermann Blode's son-in-law, cared for the abandoned property until 1939. Then, after the Hitler-Stalin Pact, German troops marched into the Memel Territory. Nida reverted to its original name, Nidden. Hermann Göring confiscated Thomas Mann's house and turned it into the hunting lodge "Elchwald" (Elk Forest). During the war, it served as a convalescent home for wounded Luftwaffe officers. In 1944, during the retreat of the Wehrmacht, it was hit by a grenade. The Soviet soldiers who moved in in 1945 burned what was left – windows, doors, and furniture. Hermann Blode's entire art collection went up in flames, burned in a sauna, as his granddaughter recounted decades later.
The Other Expellees
Thomas Mann was not the only one who lost Nidden. With the end of the war, the history of the artists' colony also came to an end. The German population fled or was expelled. The painters who survived scattered to the four winds. Ernst Mollenhauer died in exile in West Germany. Max Pechstein, who had painted in Nidden one last time in 1939, never returned.
The Lithuanian artists who arrived after 1945 found an eerie emptiness. The sculptor Eduardas Jonusas, who fled to the silence of the Curonian Spit in 1956 after five years in a Siberian labor camp, attempted to establish a new artistic tradition. He carved wooden crosses for the Nidden cemetery and sculptures for the "Hill of Witches" near Juodkrantė—symbols of the longing for freedom during the Soviet era.
What if?
Today, the town is once again called Nida and belongs to independent Lithuania, a member of the European Union. The Thomas Mann House was faithfully reconstructed in the 1990s and is now a cultural center, hosting an international festival every summer. German tourists flock there, drawn by a longing for a lost paradise.
What if Nida were still called Nida today and belonged to Germany? The question is pointless, yet revealing. Would it have become just another Baltic Sea resort, crammed with vacation homes and overrun by tourists? Would the artists' colony have survived in a world of package tours and Instagram culture?
Perhaps it's a blessing in disguise that history took a different turn. The Baltic isolation, the enforced solitude of the Soviet years, preserved the landscape. The Curonian Spit is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, protected from the worst excesses of mass tourism. The dunes are still shifting, the moose roam through the pine forests, the lagoon lies still in the evening sun.
A Melancholy Conclusion
The story of Thomas Mann's house in Nidden is more than just an episode from the life of a great writer. It is a lesson in the fragility of cultural spaces, in the cruelty of historical ruptures. Hitler's megalomania and Stalin's brutality not only led to the loss of the Memel Territory—an entire cultural region was wiped out, a centuries-old symbiosis of Germans, Lithuanians, and Curonians destroyed.
What remains is the landscape itself, this "Sahara of the North," as Thomas Mann called it. As early as 1809, Wilhelm von Humboldt had written that one must see the Curonian Spit like Italy or Spain, "if one is not to lack a wonderful image in one's soul." This image has endured, even though the people who once painted and described it have long since vanished.
The Curonian Spit was and remains a place of longing, a refuge for all who wish to escape the noise of the world. Generations of artists and writers have found inspiration here, from the Romantics to the Expressionists to Thomas Mann. Ernst Wiechert, Johannes Bobrowski, Agnes Miegel—they all wrote about this landscape, attempting to capture its unique magic in words.
Today, new artists come—Lithuanian, German, international. They still find what Thomas Mann found: a landscape of archaic beauty, where the elements of water, sand, and sky sing a primal melody. They find the stillness that modern man has lost. They find, perhaps, a place where the torn threads of history can be rewoven.
Thomas Mann's last summer in Nida was the summer of 1932. A year later, culture burned in Germany, his books burned. Twelve years later, all of East Prussia burned. But the Curonian Spit remained what it had always been: a narrow strip of land between two seas, between East and West, between yesterday and tomorrow. A place that belongs to no one and to everyone. A lost paradise, which isn't quite lost after all.
S.
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