Please join us for a talk on Erika and Klaus Mann "Traitors to the Fatherland" by Andrea Weiss, Professor or Film/Video (The City College of New York, CUNY).
Thomas Mann’s two eldest children, Erika and Klaus, were unconventional, rebellious, and fiercely devoted to each other. Empowered by their close bond, they espoused vehemently anti-Nazi views in a Europe swept up in fascism and were openly, even defiantly, gay in an age of secrecy and repression. Their story, told through excerpts from Andrea Weiss' award-winning biography, offers a fascinating view of the intellectual life, political turmoil, and shifting sexual mores of their times.
Professor Andrea Weiss is a nonfiction filmmaker and author whose most recent film, U.N. FEVER, is an observational documentary crewed by her graduate students at The City College of New York.
She is the writer-director of ESCAPE TO LIFE, a feature documentary which premiered in the Rotterdam and Berlin Film Festivals followed by y a wide European theatrical and television release.
Her previous documentary credits include I LIVE AT GROUND ZERO, RECALL FLORIDA, SEED OF SARAH, A BIT OF SCARLET, BEFORE STONEWALL (which won two Emmy Awards), INTERNATIONAL SWEETHEARTS OF RHYTHM, TINY & RUBY: HELL DIVIN’ WOMEN, and PARIS WAS A WOMAN. Her production company, Jezebel Productions (www.jezebel.org), is based in New York and London.
Dr. Weiss has a Ph.D. in history and is the author of PARIS WAS A WOMAN (Harper Collins, 1995), VAMPIRES AND VIOLETS (Penguin, 1993), and IN THE SHADOW OF THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Her books have been translated into French, German, Swedish, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Croatian.
She was awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and New York Foundation for the Arts, and was Artist-in-Residence at the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada, the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, and the D.A.A.D. Artist Program in Berlin. She has taught at the International Film and Photo Workshops in Rockport, Maine and the National Film and Television School of Great Brita
