Muse des Exils: Das Leben der Malerin Eva Herrmann by Manfred Flügge (Author)

ISBN: 9783458175506

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Insel Verlag GmbH,  October 13, 2012

Hardcover, 431 pages

A fairytale beauty, friend, lover and muse of important artists of her time, an American Jew with a Catholic-Bavarian upbringing, a nomad between the Old and New Worlds – the life of the painter Eva Herrmann was a novel with very contradictory chapters.

Born in Munich in 1901, the daughter of an American painter, Eva Herrmann grew up in Bavaria. At the age of eighteen, she first came to the USA and subsequently traveled between continents, visiting the Soviet Union and moving in the circles of exiles and artists in Sanary-sur-Mer and Los Angeles. In 1940, she left Europe and lived in California until her death in 1978. She achieved success with her caricatures of writers, being the first woman to do so. She had romantic relationships with Johannes R. Becher, Aldous Huxley, and Lion Feuchtwanger, and maintained friendships with Klaus Mann, Golo Mann, Sybille Bedford, Mercedes de Acosta, Ludwig Marcuse, and many others. Thomas and Katia Mann took her in like a daughter.

She spent her final years in a magnificent villa overlooking Santa Barbara Bay. She increasingly devoted herself to astrology and parapsychological phenomena. As a medium, she received dictations from deceased personalities, which she published from 1976 onwards under the title "From the Other Side" and which includes a post mortem afterword by Thomas Mann.