The late Nobel prize-winning author Thomas Mann’s house in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles went on the market for an asking price of $15 million in August, prompting worry among authors and artists that it was a “teardown” sale, the Guardian reports. Three thousand people signed an online petition requesting that the house be saved.

Those fears were allayed early last week when Germany bought the home to “revive the Thomas Mann villa.” Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s foreign minister, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper that Mann property was a “home for many Germans who worked toward a better future for their country, paved the way for an open society, and laid the foundations for common transatlantic values,” and that the two-year renovation would take Mann’s life work into account.

New Yorker critic Alex Ross had more effusive praise to offer in this piece written back in August: “The ‘magic villa’ on San Remo,” Ross wrote “... is more than the home of a great writer: it is a symbol of a fraught period in American history, one that gave a refugee from Nazism feelings of déjà vu.”

Mann, who authored Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (1924), and many essays and short stories, fled Germany with his family in 1933, when Hitler came to power. He eventually lived in the five-bedroom house in Los Angeles, which was designed by the modernist architect JR Davidson; the house was the site of meetings by exiled German writers, artists, and intellectuals, including Bertolt Brecht, among others.

In 1952, during the rise of McCarthyism, Mann’s family returned to Europe where, three years later, he died.

Image Credit: Associated Press.