by Colm Toibin
By 1933 Erika and Klaus Mann were famous too. Thomas Mann had not encouraged Klaus to become a writer, noting in his diary that his fourteen-year-old son’s intention to send stories to magazines was ‘a folly from which he must be dissuaded’. As adolescents, Erika and Klaus wrote plays and stories. While still teenagers, they made their way to Berlin, where Erika was determined to become a famous actress and Klaus a famous writer. As soon as he began to publish essays and stories, Klaus traded on his father’s fame with a mixture of brazenness and unease. A cartoon appeared in a satirical magazine showing him in short pants next to his father. The caption read: ‘I am told, Papa, that the son of a genius is never a genius himself. Therefore, you can’t be a genius!’ Bertolt Brecht wrote: ‘The whole world knows Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann. By the way, who is Thomas Mann?’ When The Magic Mountain appeared in 1924, Thomas Mann wrote in his son’s copy: ‘To my respected colleague – his promising father.’ Klaus was foolish enough to show it to a friend and it was quoted regularly in the press. Klaus, as he entered his twenties, was both a wunderkind and a joke.
Thomas Mann, unlike his son, was an immensely complex figure, conservative in his manners and ambiguous in his politics and, for many years, in his German nationalism. He could have been a senator and businessman like his father had it not been for something rich and almost hidden in his nature that set him apart. It was not merely a hidden sexuality, or something inherited from his slightly daft mother, but an imaginative energy and dark daring that, combined with an astonishing steely ambition and solidity, enabled him to produce Buddenbrooks when he was twenty-five.
Klaus was always simpler to read. He was fluid and generous and flighty. He kept nothing in reserve, and this, despite his obvious literary talent, made him melancholy. His father’s deep, almost obsessive interest in death was entertained and kept at bay because Thomas Mann placed it at the service of his work; a sense of doom and disease filled the pages and the spirit of the characters in Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus and many of Mann’s best stories. Mann comes to us a writer of many layers and guises. Much can be read into his work, and it is easy to understand the interest of scholars in finding a key to his peculiar artistic systems and to hidden aspects of his life. He had to be careful, once he arrived in the United States, about his sexuality and his shifting relationship with aspects of Germany that, after 1933, had become deeply unsavoury and shameful. In Bluebeard’s Chamber: Guilt and Confession in Thomas Mann (2003), Michael Maar argued, however, that Mann was, for much of his life, especially with his family, his friends, and in his work, unusually open about his sexuality.
Instead, searching for secret elements in his fiction, Maar insisted that one theme impelled and nourished Mann’s imagination more than any other. He found image after image from the beginning to the end of his work of murder, blood, knives and sexual pleasure. He suggested that this was the key to Mann’s work and perhaps to his life. ‘We can venture,’ he wrote, ‘the thought experiment that if Thomas Mann had committed an actual crime and sought to give an account of it in his fiction, the work would not have taken a different form than it actually has.’ He suggests – almost convincingly – that in Naples, in the mid-1890s, when he was a very young man, Thomas Mann did something, or witnessed something, or was closely implicated in something that involved sex and murder. And that what he did, or what he witnessed, both maimed and energized him and made its way into what he wrote over sixty years. It hardly matters whether Maar’s hypotheses are true or not. What is more interesting is the way Mann’s work continues to be examined and reread, as though the key to it remains in some furtive, cloaked part of his dark and exotic psychosexual being. ‘It is as well,’ Mann wrote in Death in Venice, ‘that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not its origins.’
Klaus, on the other hand, had no secret crimes, real or imaginary, on his conscience; instead of writing about death as his father did, he allowed the aura of death to enter his own spirit. As early as 1932 he wrote in his diary that he had thought about suicide. In February 1933 he wrote: ‘In the mornings, nothing but the wish to die. When I calculate what I have to lose, it seems negligible. No chance of a really happy relationship. Probably no chance of literary fame in the near future … Death can only be regarded as deliverance.’ What makes Klaus a subject of great fascination in Germany now, however, is not his dance with death but rather that he saw the rise of Fascism more clearly and presciently than his father did and bravely set about opposing it in every way he could while also managing to take drugs and have lots of sex. As the prevaricating father struggled with ambiguities, both political and sexual, he made masterpieces from the fight. The son was a simpler soul, more open about his sexuality, more certain of his beliefs. Out of that he made a few almost interesting books.
At the end of 1924 Klaus Mann wrote Anja and Esther, a play about a neurotic quartet of four boys and girls who were in love with each other. The following year he was approached by the actor Gustaf Gründgens, who wanted to direct the play with himself in one of the male roles, Klaus in the other; Erika Mann and Pamela Wedekind, the daughter of the playwright Frank Wedekind, would be the two young women. The ambitious Gründgens had a reputation in Hamburg but not in Berlin. At one point, as they worked on the play, Klaus planned to marry Pamela, with whom Erika fell in love, while Erika arranged to marry Gustaf, with whom Klaus began an affair. At Erika and Gustaf’s wedding reception, Erika noted that her mother’s brother was, as she wrote to Pamela, ‘flirting with Gustaf’. The honeymoon was spent in a hotel where Erika and Pamela had stayed not long before as man and wife (Pamela had checked in dressed as a man).
Anja and Esther, which opened in Hamburg in October 1925, attracted vast amounts of publicity, partly because of its scandalous content and partly because it starred three children of two famous writers. One magazine put them on the cover, cropping out Gründgens’s face, emphasizing his status as outsider amid all this fame. His marriage to Erika ended soon after it began. ‘A cynical explanation,’ Weiss writes, ‘would point out that Erika’s theatrical career had flourished to the point where she no longer needed Gustaf as stepping-stone; that Gustaf had finally realized his marriage to Erika would not bestow on him her father’s impeccable social credentials.’
Pamela Wedekind married a man old enough to be her father, and the foursome returned to being the twosome of Erika and Klaus Mann. Although Erika played the part of Queen Elisabeth in Schiller’s Don Carlos at the State Theatre in Munich, she longed for greater excitement. And since Klaus was bored and his next play a flop, they decided to go to America, where they were ready to have their genius fully recognized. To amuse themselves, they told the US press that they were twins and thus began the American myth of ‘The Literary Mann Twins’. They went on a tour of the country. ‘Whenever they were stuck for funds,’ Weiss writes, ‘Klaus would write articles and Erika would write letters to organizations, seeking lecture engagements. They often arrived in town with no change in their pockets.’ Soon, they decided to tour the world. They stayed at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo for more than six weeks – ‘kept in that luxurious prison by the evil spell of our unpaid bill’ – and, on being rescued by their father’s publisher, agreed to write a book about their travels as a way of paying him back.
They returned to Germany in 1928 and over the next five years wrote articles and books and made outrageous statements; they travelled, they had many lovers. Erika worked in the theatre and appeared in films, Klaus wrote more plays. In other words, they took full advantage of the freedoms offered by the Weimar Republic. For many in the Nazi Party, they were the epitome of all that was wrong with Germany. And their mother’s Jewish background didn’t endear them to the National Socialists either. Despite the fact that they often seemed in these years to be the silliest pair of people alive, they came nonchalantly and almost naturally to believe that their right to freedom and fun and half-baked opinions was something worth preserving. It was their s
illiness that made them serious. Once the right to go on being silly was threatened, they would respond with considerable urgency and earnestness.
Erika took almost no direct interest in politics until, in January 1932, she was asked to read a poem by Victor Hugo to a women’s pacifist group. As she stood on the stage she was shouted down, one young Brownshirt screaming: ‘You are a criminal … Jewish traitress! International agitator!’ She later wrote: ‘In the hall, everything became a mad scramble. The Stormtroopers attacked the audience with their chairs, shouting themselves into paroxysms of anger and fury.’ The Nazi newspaper later called her ‘a flatfooted peace hyena’ with ‘no human physiognomy’; she didn’t increase her popularity with the party by suing for damages and winning. ‘I realised,’ she later wrote, ‘that my experience had nothing to do with politics – it was more than politics. It touched at the very foundation of my – of our – of the existence of all.’
That winter, Erika, now out of work and living in her parents’ house, conceived the idea of starting a cabaret in Munich. Her father came up with the title. The Peppermill opened on New Year’s Day 1933. It ran for two months next door to the local Nazi headquarters, and, since it was so successful, was preparing to move to a larger theatre when the Reichstag went up in flames. Erika and Klaus were on a skiing holiday while the new theatre was being decorated and arrived back in Munich to be warned by the family chauffeur, himself a party member, that they were in danger. Later, Klaus wrote that the chauffeur ‘had been a Nazi spy throughout the four or five years he lived with us … But this time he had failed in his duty, out of sympathy, I suppose. For he knew what would happen to us if he informed his Nazi employers of our arrival in town.’
Erika and Klaus made contact with their parents, who were in Switzerland, and warned them not to return to Munich. As soon as she could, Erika drove over the border to Switzerland, where she began to prepare her parents for the idea that they were going to lose everything that they owned in Germany, including not only their houses and cars, but the manuscripts of Thomas Mann’s books and such invaluable sources as Katia’s letters to her husband from the sanatorium in Davos.
Klaus didn’t travel with his sister. Instead, he took the night train to Paris. The day he arrived, he wrote in his diary: ‘Feeling of loneliness always, whenever SHE isn’t there.’ The ‘she’ was Erika. And Erika, it seemed, was now ready to transfer her loyalty from her brother to her father. She began by returning to Munich, putting herself in some danger, once she discovered that a section of Mann’s novel-in-progress, Joseph and His Brothers, had been left behind. She sneaked back into the family home and, without turning on the lights, found the handwritten manuscript on her father’s desk. Hiding it among the tools under the seat of her car, she made her way once more across the border. (It isn’t clear why Mann didn’t ask his daughter to take his diaries too. Eventually, he sent Golo a key to the safe where they were, imploring him not to read them. ‘My fears,’ he wrote in his diary when their arrival was delayed, ‘revolve first and foremost almost exclusively around this threat to my life’s secrets. They are deeply serious. The consequences could be terrible, even fatal.’)
Erika had a strength of will that Klaus lacked, an urge to look after others, a need, which was often irritating, to put her considerable physical and emotional energies to use. Until this point, the siblings had been inseparable, Klaus constantly falling in love with Erika’s friends. With the shock of exile, Erika for much of the time left Klaus unprotected. Her attention was now directed at political action, at her own survival and at ensuring the happiness and comfort of her father. Her bossiness and her ability to organize things meant that she thrived in exile. Klaus, on the other hand, drifted. In July 1933 he wrote in his diary: ‘Thought about how sad I am to be alone … Erika has Therese [the actress Therese Giehse, who worked with Erika on The Peppermill] … By the rules of our bond, I too should be permitted to seek relationships elsewhere. I reflect on all the failed or half-failed attempts.’ He was living on money sent to him by his mother. In October he wrote: ‘Hope to receive November money – I am not, like my sister, able to manage without it, on the contrary – alas.’
It was clear that Klaus couldn’t go back to Germany. He thus had nothing to lose by denouncing the Nazi regime and saw it as the duty of all writers to do what they could to undermine Hitler. ‘Neither pleasure nor pain,’ he wrote, ‘ever makes me forget the inexorable gravity of the situation and the weight of my responsibility. Every anti-Fascist German writer must exert his whole strength today to the very utmost, and I know that, for particular reasons, I am under an especially great obligation.’ He decided to publish, from Amsterdam, a monthly literary journal, Die Sammlung, and began to ask the main German writers for contributions. He knew what he wanted to achieve. The problem was that his father, now in the South of France, was considerably more ambivalent about his duties.
Some of this arose from Mann’s fears of losing his readers in Germany and having his assets confiscated. But it also had to do with an old argument about Germany that Mann had had with his brother Heinrich. In August 1914 Mann was enthusiastic about the war. He wrote to a friend: ‘One feels that everything will have to be new after this profound, violent anguish and that the German soul will emerge stronger, prouder, freer, happier from it. So be it.’ Heinrich believed from the beginning that Germany would lose. In an essay written in 1915, ostensibly about Zola, he launched an attack on his brother:
The whole nationalistic catechism, filled with madness and crime – and those who preach it, is it out of eagerness or, even worse, vanity … Because you’re eager to please you become poet laureate for half a lifetime, if you don’t run out of breath beforehand, desperate to run with the crowd, always cheering it on, high on emotion, with no sense of responsibility for – and no awareness of – the impending catastrophe like a loser! … It does not matter now that you take an elegant stance against truth and justice; you oppose it and belong to the base and fleeting. You’ve chosen between the moment and history and concede that in spite of all your talents you are just an amusing parasite.
By that time Mann had ceased work on The Magic Mountain and begun writing a reply to his brother, called Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. It was six hundred pages long. Golo remembered him writing it:
We had once loved our father almost as tenderly as our mother, but that changed during the war. He could still project an aura of kindness, but for the most part we experienced only silence, sternness, nervousness or anger. I can remember all too well certain scenes at mealtimes, outbreaks of rage and brutality that were directed at my brother Klaus but brought tears to my own eyes. If a person cannot always be very nice to those around him when he is devoting himself exclusively to his creative work, must it not be much more difficult when he is struggling day after day with Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man in which the sinking of the British ship Lusitania with twelve hundred civilian passengers on board is actually hailed, to name just one of the book’s grimmest features … This work, coming into being only for itself, or for its author, was a castle laid out like a labyrinth, meant to be torn down no sooner than it was built.
Even as late as March 1920 Mann was unrepentant. ‘Heinrich’s position,’ he wrote, ‘no matter how splendid it appears at the moment, is basically already undermined by events and experiences. His orientation towards the West, his worship of the French, his Wilsonism etc are antiquated and withered.’
In his biography of Mann, published in 1999, Hermann Kurzke traces the ironies, the contradictions and the changes of opinion in Mann’s politics between 1918 and 1922, when, in a speech called ‘The German Republic’, he seemed to recant. Kurzke writes that Mann, in these years, developed friendships, some of them close, with figures such as Ernst Bertram, Elisabeth Mann’s godfather, who later became supporters of the Nazis or fellow-travellers with the regime. Kurzke is cautious, however, about making too much of this:
Does that make Thomas Mann a pr
ecursor of Fascism? He certainly made an effort to stay out of the way of the resurgent right-wing movement of the time. Very early on in the summer of 1921, he took note of the rising Nazi movement and dismissed it as ‘swastika nonsense’. As early as 1925 when Hitler was still imprisoned in Landsberg, he rejected the cultural barbarity of German Fascism with an extensive, decisive and clearly visible gesture.
In May 1933, when ‘un-German’ books were being burned, Heinrich Mann’s were on the bonfire. Thomas Mann’s were not. He was still being protected by Bertram, among others. But his main protection was his own silence. When the first issue of Die Sammlung appeared, it had a provocative essay by Heinrich Mann and an editorial by Klaus: ‘The true, valid German literature … cannot remain silent before the degradation of its people and the outrage it perpetrates on itself … A literary periodical is not a political periodical … Nevertheless, today it will have a political mission. Its position must be unequivocal.’
Goebbels, in retaliation, stripped Heinrich of his citizenship, and the following year Klaus, too, was declared stateless. In 1935, five days after her marriage to W. H. Auden, her second husband, Erika was also stripped of her citizenship. (Auden seemed to get infinite amusement from his relationship with the Manns. ‘What else are buggers for?’ he replied when asked why he had married the soon-to-be-stateless Erika. ‘I didn’t see her till the ceremony and perhaps I shall never see her again,’ he wrote to Stephen Spender. ‘Who’s the most boring German writer? My father-in-law.’ He said about Klaus: ‘For an author, sons are an embarrassment, as if characters in his novel had come to life.’)
Thomas Mann confined his views on what was happening in Germany to his diary. On 10 April 1933 he wrote:
