Mandl was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, the son of Czech Jewish parents, the engineer Daniel Mandl and Hajnalka Mandl. He was educated in Jewish and Czech schools in Bratislava and in Brno. He began to play the violin at the age of 6.
Registration form of Herbert Thomas Mandl as a prisoner at Dachau Nazi Concentration Camp
The Mandls were living in Brno when the remains of Czechoslovakia were annexed by Nazi Germany on March 15, 1939. Mandl was 13 at the time. In 1942, Mandl and his parents were deported to the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto. In 1944, Mandl and his father were transported to the Auschwitzconcentration camp, thence to several Dachau-Kaufering satellite camps, where Mandl's father died. At the end of World War II, Mandl was repatriated to Czechoslovakia where he was reunited with his mother.
Slavi and Tommy Mandl in 1978
Once free, Mandl returned to his studies. He was ultimately awarded a doctorate in the performing arts (violin) from the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague[4] in Prague, where he met his future wife, Jaroslava (“Slavi”), a concert pianist. While professors of music at the Janáček Conservatory[5] in Ostrava, the Mandls developed several plans for escaping to the West from the oppressive conditions in Communist Czechoslovakia. Mandl himself finally succeeded in Cairo, where he broke away from his tourist group and applied for asylum at the United States Embassy in Cairo.[6] Initially, he was suspected of being a spy, and the CIA interrogated him for months. When released, he was placed in a refugee camp in Zirndorf, West Germany. (“There were as many spies as real refugees there,” he had said of Zirndorf.) Once granted the status of political refugee, Mandl moved to Cologne, where he became the private secretary of Heinrich Böll, the recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize for Literature. Since Mandl’s wife Slavi had remained behind in Ostrava (this was by the Mandls' prior agreement), Böll had agreed to help smuggle her to the West. He engaged a professional illusionist to build a hideaway in his personal automobile, a Citroen DS-19, drove to Czechoslovakia with his entire family and smuggled Slavi out. This incident is documented in Mandl's autobiography, Durst, Musik, Geheime Dienste[7] published in Germany in 1995 and in a Bavarian television film directed by Gloria de Siano.
In later years, Mandl produced and edited cultural broadcasts that were transmitted to Communist Eastern Europe by the West German radio station Deutsche Welle in Cologne. He and Slavi twice emigrated to the USA, where he studied psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington and was supervisor on the ward for the criminally insane at Western State Hospital in Tacoma, Washington. In 1971, the Mandls permanently returned to West Germany, settling in Meerbusch-Büderich. Mandl found a position as a professor of English at the Roman Catholic evening gymnasium (Nikolaus-Groß-Abendgymnasium[de]) in Essen, where he remained until his retirement.
In addition to his other talents, Mandl was an inventor. He developed and patented two very different devices. One was a transparent model of a human head (the phonetic head)[8] that contained movable speech organs and was used to help teach pronunciation of foreign languages. The second was the Suggestometer, a complex device that could be used to measure human suggestibility empirically – something that was considered impossible by research psychologists at the time. Mandl was also a very successful psychotherapist who continued to provide mental health treatment even after his retirement. During the last decades of his life, Mandl was a very active as a contemporary witness to the musical scene in the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto; he had played the violin in the camp orchestra in 1943/44 under the batons of Karel Ančerl and Carlo Sigmund Taube.
Mandl was a tireless contemporary witness to the horrors of life under totalitarian regimes and particularly to the Holocaust, traveling throughout Europe and North America to deliver his message. As one of the few survivors of the Terezín ghetto musical scene, he provided expert eyewitness accounts for this extraordinary phenomenon.
Literary Themes
The central theme of Mandl’s literary work is the battle of the individual against the sophisticated instruments of totalitarian oppression: secret services, isolation, psychological torture, brainwashing, incarceration, starvation, the debilitating effects of the "daily grind" in the most difficult of circumstances. As in works by Edgar Allan Poe, Aldous Huxley, Franz Kafka and George Orwell, Mandl's protagonists, armed only with their reason, stand alone against all the sophisticated torture arts of their seemingly omnipotent opponents. In his works, Mandl underscores the drama of this unequal combat by interspersing the narrative with philosophical reflections written in clear and meaningful language. His novel, The Philosopher’s Wager (published in Germany in 1996 as Die Wette des Philosophen,[9] is remarkable for its vivid portrayal of not just the most mundane aspects of life in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto but also of the extensive, if illegal, cultural and musical life of the ghetto. (For more on this subject, see also University Over the Abyss by Elena Makarova, Sergei Makarov and Viktor Kuperman).
Works
Prose
Der Held und sein Geheimnis (The Hero and His Secret), short stories, Bernardus, 1991.
Productive Defiance- Culture and the Holocaust, lecture given at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as a prologue to the performance of the opera of Viktor Ullmann "The Emperor of Atlantis" performed by ARBOS - Company for Music and Theatre, Washington D.C., November 1998
A Memory of Elias Canetti, published by ACCUS-Theatre, St.Pölten 2003
Mass murder and Culture - Johann Sebastian Bach resistance fighter, Berlin 2005
Audio-CD
Die Reise ins Zentrum der Wirklichkeit (The Trip to the Center of Reality), published by ARBOS - Company for Music and Theatre, TW 972172, Tonstudio Weikert, Glanhofen 1997
Film
Spuren nach Theresienstadt/Tracks to Terezín. Interview and director: Herbert Gantschacher; camera: Robert Schabus; graphics: Erich Heyduck / DVD in German and English; ARBOS, Wien-Salzburg-Klagenfurt, 2007.
Unbekannter Böll/Der Nobelpreisträger als mutiger Fluchthelfer (The Unknown Böll/The Nobel Laureate’s Courageous Collaboration in an Escape). Film by Gloria de Siano. 3sat Kulturjournal 14. January 2004
Theater
Die Reise ins Zentrum der Wirklichkeit (Voyage to the Center of Reality), performed in Hallein and Klagenfurt, Austria; premiere sponsored by ARBOS – Company for Music and Theatre, 1997.
Der dreifache Traum von der Maschine (The Threefold Dream of the Machine), performed in Prora/Rügen, Germany, and Salzburg, Villach and Arnoldstein, Austria; premiere sponsored by ARBOS-Gesellschaft für Musik und Theater, 2004.[10]
Der vertagte Heldentod (A Hero's Death Postponed), performed in Prora/Rügen, Germany and Villach and Arnoldstein, Austria; premiere sponsored by ARBOS-Gesellschaft für Musik und Theater, 2005.
Das Ziel der Verschollenen (The Destination of the Vanishing), performed in Arnoldstein, Austria; premiere sponsored by ARBOS – Company for Music and Theatre, 2006.
Mandl's other works for the stage include:
Das Gehirnklavier oder Das zweite Experiment (The Brain Instrument or The Second Experiment)
Der Gast aus der Transzendenz (The Guest from Transcendence), also in novel format
Die übersinnliche Verschwörung (The Transcendental Conspiracy)
Verhöre mit ungewissem Ergebnis (Interrogations with Doubtful Outcomes)
Opera
Šarlatán / Der Scharlatan (The Charlatan) Opera composed by Pavel Haas, German version of the libretto by Herbert Thomas Mandl and Jaroslava Mandl (Czech National Library 1993)
In addition to being published in Germany, several of Mandl's works have been translated into Czech and published in the Czech Republic between 1994 and 2000. Other unpublished stories, dramas and presentations with philosophical and political themes are contained in Mandl’s bequest to the archives of the Moses Mendelssohn Academy in Halberstadt, Germany.
As long as you still have breath left in your body, you should continue to speak out loudly as a contemporary witness to the National Socialist era.
—Herbert Thomas Mandl on the occasion of the premiere of his play The Voyage to the Center of Reality (in German only, as Die Reise ins Zentrum der Wirklichkeit, 1997)
Related Research Articles
Terezín is a town in Litoměřice District in the Ústí nad Labem Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 2,800 inhabitants. It is a former military fortress composed of the citadel and adjacent walled garrison town. The town centre is well preserved and is protected by law as an urban monument reservation. Terezin is most infamously the location of the Nazis' notorious Theresienstadt Ghetto.
Brundibár is a children's opera by Jewish Czech composer Hans Krása with a libretto by Adolf Hoffmeister, made most famous by performances by the children of Theresienstadt concentration camp (Terezín) in occupied Czechoslovakia. The name comes from a Czech colloquialism for a bumblebee.
Kurt Gerron was a German Jewish actor and film director. He and his wife, Olga were murdered in the Holocaust.
Theresienstadt Ghetto was established by the SS during World War II in the fortress town of Terezín, in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Theresienstadt served as a waystation to the extermination camps. Its conditions were deliberately engineered to hasten the death of its prisoners, and the ghetto also served a propaganda role. Unlike other ghettos, the exploitation of forced labor was not economically significant.
Viktor Ullmann was a Silesia-born Austrian composer, conductor and pianist.
Karel Berman was a Jewish Czech opera singer, composer and opera director.
Rafael Schächter, was a Czechoslovak composer, pianist and conductor of Jewish origin, organizer of cultural life in Terezín concentration camp.
Miroslav Kárný was a historian and writer from Prague, Czechoslovakia.
Wilhelm Jerusalem was an Austrian Jewish philosopher and pedagogue.
Der Kaiser von Atlantis oder Die Tod-Verweigerung is a one-act opera by Viktor Ullmann with a libretto by Peter Kien. They collaborated on the work while interned in the Nazi concentration camp of Theresienstadt (Terezín) around 1943. The Nazis did not allow it to be performed there.
Peter Kien was a Jewish artist and poet active at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He died at the age of twenty-five.
Daniel Mandl was a civil engineer, inventor, and a student of anthroposophy.
University over the Abyss is a book about the educational and cultural life in the Terezín ghetto. Authors Elena Makarova, Sergei Makarov and Viktor Kuperman have searched available archives, interviewed survivors worldwide and compiled the definitive summary of this nominally illegal but extensive phenomenon that included formal lectures, poetry readings, concerts, storytelling sessions and theatrical and opera performances, all in a setting that was a holding place for prisoners who were ultimately on their way to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
Herbert Gantschacher is an Austrian director and producer and writer.
ARBOS – Company for Music and Theatre in Vienna, Salzburg and Klagenfurt, is a society specialized in the realisation of new forms of theatre especially of projects for contemporary new music theatre, scenic concerts, theatre for young people, theatre concerts, deaf theatre, directed space, theatrical exhibitions and other forms of the arts.
Spuren nach Theresienstadt / Tracks to Terezín is a film with Herbert Thomas Mandl, a survivor of the Holocaust.
Josef (Pepek) Taussig was a Czech journalist.
The Small Fortress is a fortress forming a significant part of the town of Terezín in the Czech Republic. The former military fortress was established at the end of the 18th century together with the whole town of Terezín on the right bank of the Ohře River. It served as a prison in the 19th century.
Anna Hájková is a Czech-British historian who is currently a faculty member at the University of Warwick. She specializes in the study of everyday life during the Holocaust and sexuality and the Holocaust. According to Hájková, "My approach to queer Holocaust history shows a more complex, more human, and more real society beyond monsters and saints."
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