Frido Mann’s reverence for democracy draws from family history. The psychologist and author grew up in southern California, where his grandfather, Nobel Prize-winning novelist and essayist Thomas Mann, settled after fleeing Germany upon Hitler’s rise to power in the early 1930s. Thomas Mann lectured extensively across the U.S. about “the coming victory of democracy,” warning of the dangers of fascism in a liberal democracy.

His grandson has picked up that mantle. Frido Mann visits the Library as part of a lecture tour across more than a dozen cities in the U.S. and Canada, recounting his family’s experiences and discussing the need for dialogue in a polarized America and across borders and oceans.

He then is joined by German-Italian photographer and filmmaker Luigi Toscano in a short conversation moderated by University of Missouri-Kansas City film studies professor Larson Powell. Toscano’s powerful outdoor exhibition Lest We Forget, a series of large-scale portraits of Holocaust survivors, is on display in the Memorial Courtyard outside the National World War I Museum and Memorial from September 20 to October 6.