page_title: Nida, Lithuania
section_title: Artists' colony
hierarchical_section_title: Nida, Lithuania / History / Artists' colony
context_page_description: Nida is a resort town in Lithuania, the administrative centre of Neringa municipality. Located on the Curonian Spit between the Curonian Lagoon and the Baltic Sea, it is the westernmost point of Lithuania and the Baltic states, close to the border with the Russian Kaliningrad Oblast exclave. It currently has about 2,385 residents.
context_section_description: From the late 19th century, the dune landscape became popular with landscape and animal painters from the Kunstakademie Königsberg arts school. The local inn of Herman Blode was the nucleus of the expressionist artists' colony (Künstlerkolonie Nidden). Lovis Corinth sojourned there, as did Max Pechstein, Alfred Lichtwark, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Alfred Partikel. Painters from Königsberg such as Julius Freymuth and Eduard Bischoff visited the area, as did poets such as Ernst Wiechert and Carl Zuckmayer. Other guests included Ernst Kirchner, Ernst Mollenhauer, Franz Domscheit, and Herrmann Wirth. The painters usually took accommodations at Blode's hotel, and left some of their works with him. Some also built their own residences in the vicinity.
  After World War I Nidden, together with the northern half of the Curonian Spit (Kurische Nehrung), became part of the Klaipėda Region (Memelland) under terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles and was annexed by Lithuania in 1923. Officially renamed Nida, the village nevertheless remained a predominantly German settlement; the border with the remaining German (East Prussian) half of the spit lay only a few kilometers to the south.
  In 1929 Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas Mann visited Nida while on holiday in nearby Rauschen and decided to have a summer house erected on a hill above the lagoon; it was mocked  by locals as Uncle Tom's Cabin (Onkel Toms Hütte). He and his family spent the summers of 1930–32 in the cottage, and parts of the epic novel Joseph and His Brothers (Joseph und seine Brüder) were written there.
  Threatened by the Nazis due to his political views, Mann left Germany after Hitler's Machtergreifung in 1933 and eventually emigrated to the United States. After the Klaipėda Region was again annexed by (now Nazified) Germany in 1939, his house was seized at the behest of Hermann Göring and designated a recreation home for Luftwaffe officers.
caption: Corinth: Churchyard in Nidden (1893)
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