The Hotel de la Tour

Many exiles have mentioned, in their works or letters, the Hotel de la Tour. Some stay for just one night, while others stay longer.

Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann’s eldest son, stayed here several times, even using the hotel address as a temporary home in 1933. Bertolt Brecht, accompanied by his collaborator and companion Margarete Steffin, stayed for several weeks. During this time, he worked on his new play, L’opéra de quat’sous. In 1939, the Hôtel de la Tour was first used by the French as headquarters, then by the Italians in 1940, before housing the German Kommandantur from 1942 to 1944.

The hotel, built around a medieval fortified tower, was inaugurated in 1898. It quickly became a must-see address on Sanary’s harborfront, and many writers, painters and other artists stayed here.

In the 1930s, with the rise of Nazism in Germany, a large number of anti-Nazi intellectuals, including many Jews and Communists, took refuge in France, including Sanary. Some rented apartments, while others stayed in hotels, as in the case of Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann, his sister Erika, his uncle Heinrich Mann and Bertolt Brecht, who stayed several times at the Hôtel de la Tour.

After a spell in Paris, Bertolt Brecht, a frequent visitor to the Côte d’Azur since 1928, came to Sanary in October 1933 to visit his old friend Lion Feuchtwanger. With his companion and close collaborator Margarete Steffin, a 24-year-old Communist, he stayed for several weeks at the Hôtel de la Tour. During his stay, he worked on his play “L’opéra de quat’sous”. To his wife Helene Weigel, busy in Denmark fitting out the new house they had bought, he wrote: “One gets bored on the Mediterranean coast”.

When Klaus Mann arrived in Sanary on May 11, 1933, and took up residence in room 7 on the second floor of the hotel, he read in the newspapers that the previous day his books had been publicly burned on Königsplatz in Munich. The idea of launching a magazine out of exile took shape, and a few months later the first issue of Die Sammlung was published. Twenty-three more monthlies followed, with contributions from Bertolt Brecht, Jean Cocteau, Albert Einstein, André Gide, Lion Feuchtwanger, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, Heinrich and Golo Mann and many others. However, several writers, including Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig, anxious not to offend their German readership with the aggressive style of certain texts, withdrew their promise of collaboration and distanced themselves from the publication, which was halted for lack of funding in 1935. A few years later, in the same room, Klaus Mann completed his novel Mephisto.

Long before his younger brother Thomas, whose fame overshadowed his work, Heinrich Mann discovered the charm of the Côte d’Azur. A Francophile and democrat, an admirer of the revolutionary ideas of 1789, he was a regular visitor to Nice, where he went into exile after Hitler’s accession to power. However, he often came to Sanary to see his brother and friends René Schickele and Wilhelm Herzog. He stayed at the Hotel de La Tour, where he completed his historical novel “Henri IV”, published in exile in two volumes in 1935 and 1938. This work brought Heinrich Mann to the attention of the literate public in France. His novel Professor Unrat (1905), adapted for the film “L’ange bleue” (1930) starring Marlene Dietrich ? made him famous worldwide.

Friday, September 22, 1933, Thomas and Katia Mann are having lunch on the terrace of the hotel restaurant. After a stay of several months, they are about to leave Sanary for Geneva. One last time, they savor the colors of the South, the picturesque harbor scene. They had tea again at the Schickeles’, after which Hans, the latter’s son, took them to Toulon station, where they boarded the sleeper for Geneva. On October 17, 1933, settled in Switzerland, Thomas Mann wrote to René Schickele: “I have fond memories of Sanary”.