The photograph shows the writer Thomas Mann during his farewell reading in the Zurich playhouse. On 13 September 1938, the writer read several passages from his unfinished novel Lotte in Weimar. The preceding months had been emotional for him. Due to the aggressive expansion of Nazi Germany, Mann decided to emigrate abroad at the start of 1938. After Austria’s loss of autonomy in March that year, he viewed the political independence of Switzerland, where he had been living since autumn 1933, as increasingly under threat. Although he had developed a strong sense of attachment to the country, he had already soberly been considering the “danger of a European catastrophe” since the summer of 1934. Inspired by several successful lecture tours through the USA and a reception with President Roosevelt, the holder of the Nobel Prize for Literature chose the university town of Princeton in the state of New Jersey as his new home. However, he visited Zurich again in summer 1938 together with his wife Katia, for an emotional farewell from the land which had become a second home for him in the years after 1933. According to a note in his diary, everything appeared dream-like during the visit. Four days after his reading at the Zurich playhouse, Thomas Mann sailed with his wife and youngest daughter Elisabeth from the English port of Southhampton back to the United States. It was only in 1952 that he returned to Switzerland permanently.