Life and Cases

Life and Cases – an (unfinished) autobiography of F. A. Mann, who arrived in London as a German-Jewish émigré, forced to leave Germany on the cusp of a promising career in German academia. He retrained as an English solicitor to become one of the leading lawyers of his time.

From the introduction of Mann’s autobiography: “I write [an autobiography], because I am persuaded that it is my duty to tell the story of a world that has disappeared, but should not be forgotten, – the story of a highly cultured German Jewish bourgeois milieu which perished in Auschwitz, though my nearest and dearest succeeded in escaping. The history of the rise and fall of that social class merits to be preserved, but stands in danger of falling into oblivion on account of the lack of specific material, – no great novel describing its drama and tragedy has yet been written.”