Manon's World

de James Reidel

Manon Gropius had three parents. She was the daughter of Alma Mahler (the widow of Gustav Mahler) and her second husband, Walter Gropius (the architect and founder of the Bauhaus school), and also was the stepdaughter of Alma's third husband, Franz Werfel. Manon's World explores the life and death of a child at the center of a broken love triangle. Not just a narrative biography, Manon's World is a medical history of the polio that killed Manon and an intimate cultural history of the aspirations projected on her, as seen by the Nobel Prize-winner Elias Canette who devoted two chapter of his memoirs to his encounters with Manon. In the same spirit, the composer Alban Berg dedicated his Violin Concerto to her. Reidel reveals a complex image of a young woman who desired to be an actress and artist in her own right despite being her mother’s intended prote ge , an inspiration to her father who rarely saw her, and her stepfather Franz Werfel. -- Adapted from dust jacket.