New Ways to Kill Your Mother

by Colm Toibin

  But for all that, might not something deeply significant and revolutionary be taking place in Germany? The Jews: it is no calamity after all … that the domination of the legal system by the Jews has been ended. Secret, disquieting, persistent musings … I am beginning to suspect that in spite of everything this process is one of those that has two sides to them.

  On 20 April he wrote:

  I could have a certain understanding for the rebellion against the Jewish element were it not that the Jewish spirit exercises a necessary control over the German element, the withdrawal of which is dangerous; left to themselves the Germans are so stupid as to lump people of my type in the same category and drive me out with the rest.

  While it is important to read these musings as musings, they were of a type that Heinrich Mann never went in for, nor did Erika and nor did Klaus; they were certainly not shared with Thomas Mann’s wife and were never aired in public; they were countered by such remarks as: ‘Anti-Semitism is the disgrace of any educated and culturally engaged person.’

  When Mann found that his name was first on the list of future contributors to Die Sammlung, he wrote in his diary that ‘Klaus has played a trick on us by including Heinrich’s article in the first issue.’ When a German trade magazine reprinted an official warning to booksellers not to stock books by anyone associated with Die Sammlung, Mann sent them a telegram that was widely reproduced in Germany: ‘Can only confirm that the character of the first issue of Die Sammlung does not correspond to its original programme.’ He had openly repudiated his son’s magazine. The following month Mann moved to a large three-storey villa in Switzerland and Erika opened The Peppermill in Zurich. Klaus was on his own in Amsterdam. ‘Long letter from the Magician’ – his father – ‘the most humiliating sensation … Sorrow and confusion,’ he wrote in his diary. He was taking heroin and morphine, and wrote in his diary about longing for death.

  Thomas Mann continued to be published in Germany until 1936. When Bermann Fischer, his German publisher, was denounced by exiles as a Jewish protégé of Goebbels, Mann’s fervent public defence of him was too much for Erika. She wrote to her father:

  You are stabbing in the back the entire émigré movement – I can put it no other way. Probably you will be very angry at me because of this letter. I am prepared for that, and I know what I’m doing. This friendly time is predestined to separate people – in how many cases has it happened already. Your relation to Dr Bermann and his publishing house is indestructible – you seem to be ready to sacrifice everything for it. In that case it is a sacrifice for you that I, slowly but surely, will be lost for you – then just never mind. For me it is sad, and terrible. I am your child, E.

  More than sixty years later Elisabeth remembered the confrontation. Erika, she said,

  threatened never to want to see him again, I mean she went as far as that in her letter. She was full of real and deep political passion, Erika was. And quite, quite uncompromising. Klaus didn’t ever have the same kind of intellectual violence. He also had strong convictions, he also felt betrayed when he did not get the support for his journal that he hoped he would get. That was a bitter disappointment for him, but he never had the aggressiveness that Erika had, never.

  Klaus sent his father a telegram beseeching him to make a statement in solidarity with the émigré writers. Katia, in the meantime, tried to dissuade Erika from breaking with her father, telling her that, aside from Elisabeth and Katia herself, she was ‘the only person on whom Z.’s heart really hangs, and your letter hurt deeply and made him ill.’ Z. is der Zauberer, ‘the magician’.

  Thomas Mann replied to Erika asking for time to consider what she had said. This caused Erika to become even angrier. She blamed her father for doing more harm to Klaus in the row over Die Sammlung than the Nazis had ever done. Her mother had had enough and began a draft of an open letter under the name of Thomas Mann. While mild in its tone, it was his first public statement from exile against the Nazis. Once he had released it, he wrote to a friend: ‘I am finally saving my soul.’ He was immediately notified that his honorary doctorate from Bonn University had been rescinded. He, his wife and their four younger children lost their German citizenship.

  While all this was going on, Klaus was working on the novel for which he is best known, Mephisto, which was published in Amsterdam in 1936. It deals, in a way that is almost open, with Klaus’s former lover and brother-in-law, Gustaf Gründgens, and his rise to power as an actor in Nazi Germany. Although it has its dramatic moments, some of it is very badly written. The narrative regularly gets carried away in its efforts to portray the Nazis as pure evil and the actor Hendrik Höfgen as ambitious, flawed, sexually perverse, a man ready to sell his soul while tempting others to do the same.

  Some of the writing, in its flatness and exaggeration, would have made Thomas Mann wince. But one section of the book must have hurt him more than any number of threatening letters from Erika. Klaus, it seems to me, managed to include aspects of his father in the character of Höfgen. This is something that Mann in his diaries and his letters, as published in English, makes no mention of, and I can find no reference to it in the many biographies of Mann. Nonetheless, it seems clear that Klaus used a small part of his father in his attempt to dramatize political treachery for the sake of artistic success.

  In Mephisto, Hendrik marries Barbara Bruckner, a version of Erika, whose father is also a version of Thomas Mann. Hendrik’s new father-in-law was ‘a scholar and thinker who was not only one of the most eminent and talked about figures on the European literary scene but also one of the most influential in political circles’. The actor’s father-in-law is referred to throughout as ‘the privy councillor’, or the ‘Geheimrat’, a term used in the Mann family to describe not Thomas Mann, but Mann’s own father-in-law, Alfred Pringsheim.

  When Thomas Mann, an awkward, ambitious young man from the Baltic, married Katia Pringsheim, he was no less intimidated by the cultural sophistication and general social confidence of Katia’s family than Hendrik Höfgen was by the family of Barbara Bruckner in Mephisto. (Golo remembers his father saying of Katia’s family: ‘They have never liked me, nor I them.’) In some passages, the novel seems to be merging the relationship between the provincial actor Gründgens and the Manns with the relationship between Thomas Mann and the Pringsheims. In that sense Thomas Mann appears hidden in the character of Höfgen, both of them marrying above their station, both later selling their soul, or refusing to speak out, for the sake of continued or greater fame as artists. Klaus, who wasn’t generally given to subtlety, is subtle about this particular trick, but it wouldn’t have escaped the attention of the old magician that his son, by using the word ‘Geheimrat’ so often to describe Höfgen’s father-in-law, was comparing his father to an artist who had famously sold his soul. Seven years later, Mann would begin his own book on the same subject, the magisterial Doctor Faustus.

  In September 1936, Erika and Klaus moved from Europe to the United States, where Erika began an affair with a German doctor who was staying at her hotel. According to Sybille Bedford, she ‘went off women, she really became interested in men, she went off with people’s husbands even’. Klaus had an affair with an American dancer. The Peppermill was to be performed in New York with its European cast. Although the lyrics had been translated into English, some by Auden, the show was a disaster and soon taken off.

  Very quickly Erika learned enough English to begin giving lectures all over the US. When Klaus’s visa ran out he returned to Europe, staying with his parents in Switzerland, amazed to find that, without consulting him, his father had founded his own bimonthly journal for German émigrés and appointed an editor. Klaus wrote in his diary: ‘I perceive, again, very strongly and not without bitterness, Z.’s complete coldness to me … His universal lack of interest in people is here especially intensified.’ It’s clear from Erika’s letters that Klaus was taking a great deal of heroin.

  In March 1937 the entire Mann family, including Heinrich, w
as granted Czechoslovak citizenship. Klaus could now travel to Budapest to seek treatment for his heroin addiction, treatment which did not fully work. Six months later he returned to the US and to Erika, who took him with her on what became joint lecture tours. Their titles included ‘What Price Peace?’, ‘What Does the Youth of Europe Believe in Today?’ and ‘Our Father and His Work’. They wrote two books together.

  Soon, Thomas and Katia Mann arrived in America as well, and, with their fourteen suitcases in tow, began to tour the country too. When Klaus published a new novel, his father wrote to say that he’d admired it, adding that when he first saw it he ‘secretly had the wicked intention’ of not reading it through but ‘just looking into’ it. Of the letters he received from his father about his work, Klaus noted in his diary: ‘He writes to complete strangers just as pleasantly. A mixture of highest intelligence, almost charitable courtesy – and ice coldness. This is especially accentuated when it concerns me.’ In 1939, Mann published Lotte in Weimar, in which Goethe’s son is introduced as follows: ‘August is his son; and to the father’s mind the boy’s existence exhausted itself in that fact.’ He added: ‘To be the son of a great man is a high fortune, a considerable advantage. But it is likewise an oppressive burden, a permanent derogation of one’s ego.’ The great man settled in Princeton, where he had Bruno Walter and Einstein for neighbours.

  In 1938 Klaus and Erika reported on the Spanish Civil War which had broken out in 1936. Erika wrote School for Barbarians, a book on the Nazi education system; it sold 40,000 copies in the US in the first three months after publication. Erika slowly became one of the most successful and highly paid women lecturers in the country. Both she and Klaus believed passionately that America should straightaway enter the war and were appalled by the attitude of Auden and Christopher Isherwood, who had left England and thus avoided active involvement in the war. In his diary, Klaus recognized in Auden ‘the cold charms’ of Gustaf Gründgens, but he refused to be seduced by them. When he saw the ménage that Auden had established in Brooklyn with Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, among others, he wrote in his diary: ‘What an epic one could write about this!’ Soon Golo too moved in, having escaped from the Nazis by walking over the Pyrenees with his Uncle Heinrich, Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel.

  Isherwood, who was in the habit of thinking well of people, thought Klaus ‘without vanity or self-consciousness’; ‘his great charm,’ Isherwood said, ‘lay in this openness, this eager, unaffected approach.’ Others didn’t share his view. Glenway Wescott called Klaus a ‘tragic twerp’; Janet Flanner thought he was pathetically dominated by Erika, who flew to Europe in 1940 to work as a war correspondent for the BBC, leaving Klaus in New York feeling ‘envy and anxiety’ and resenting the fact that his sister had once again left him behind. He would continue to be supported financially by his parents. When a New York editor informed Auden and Kallman that he would soon be publishing Klaus’s autobiography, they fell around laughing and said: ‘What will you call it? The Invisible Man? The Subordinate Klaus?’

  Klaus’s autobiography was called The Turning Point. It was an exercise in tact. He couldn’t attack his father openly, since he was living off him financially and operating in the US in his father’s shadow, a shadow that was both protective and damaging. In his autobiography he took every opportunity to single out and praise his Uncle Heinrich rather than his father, but was careful not to write about his father in the same wounded tone he used in his diaries. The account in the book of his father hollering from the window on seeing his son leaving home – ‘Good luck, my son! And come home when you are wretched and forlorn’ – reads like pure mythology, or a sad joke. When he wrote to Klaus about the book, Mann told him he had absolutely no memory of ever saying that.

  In Klaus’s version of the early years in exile when his father would not denounce the regime, he exalted Heinrich for being ‘the first to receive the enviable distinction’ of getting on Goebbels’s blacklist. His uncle, he wrote, ‘had left Berlin soon after the Reichstag Fire and, once in France, lost no time in raising his voice to arraign and ridicule the brown canaille … Heinrich Mann – a man in his early sixties at the beginning of his exile – experienced something like a second youth.’ He himself, he wrote, was on Goebbels’s second list and Erika on the third. When he came to write about Die Sammlung, he mentioned that it was produced under the sponsorship of ‘André Gide, Heinrich Mann and Aldous Huxley’. There was no mention of his father.

  ‘As for our father,’ he finally wrote, the Nazis, ‘still afraid of public opinion abroad’, were more ‘reluctant’ to place him on a blacklist: ‘At this point his works were not officially banned; although as far back as 1933, to ask openly for a book by Thomas Mann in a German bookstore was a risky thing to do. For his feelings towards Nazism were generally known, and were emphasised, furthermore, by his refusal to return to Munich.’ When Klaus mentioned ‘the inevitable clash’ between his father and the Nazis, he neglected to say that it didn’t take place until 1936. He described the immense comfort and ease of his father’s early exile in Switzerland without any appearance of irony. By the time the book appeared, Thomas Mann had reinvented himself as the most vocal and serious opponent of the Nazis among the German exiles in the United States. It must have pleased him that Klaus had done nothing to damage his new position. He wrote him a bland and affectionate letter: ‘It is an unusually charming, kind, sensitive, clever and honestly personal book.’ The poet Muriel Rukeyser remembered Klaus frantically waiting for this letter, tearing it open when it came and reading it ‘in a moving, suspended moment of all the mixed feeling that can be found in the autobiography itself’.

  In these years Klaus, without Erika, grew increasingly unhappy and went on taking drugs and falling unsuitably in love. The FBI was on his case, having been told that both he and Erika were Communists. ‘When Fascism spread across Europe,’ Weiss writes, ‘the FBI expended considerable time and resources harassing two of the strongest and most dedicated advocates for liberal democracy, both of whom had great respect for the government of the United States.’ Erika and Klaus were guilty, it seemed, not only of ‘premature’ anti-Fascism but of ‘having affairs together’. It was reported that ‘many queer-looking people’ could be seen going into Klaus’s hotel room in New York, as indeed they could. Klaus remarked in his diary that he liked ‘porters, waiters, liftboys and so on, white or black. Almost all are agreeable to me. I could sleep with all of them.’ Sybille Bedford recalled that what attracted Klaus ‘were the professional louts’.

  During this period, Erika grew closer to her father but, as Weiss writes, ‘Klaus’s estrangement from the Magician did not ameliorate with the reconciliation of their political differences; it was always about something deeper. The sacred bond the siblings shared since childhood, forged in resistance to Thomas Mann and all he represented, no longer could sustain itself with the same passionate intensity.’

  After Pearl Harbor, Klaus decided to join the US Army. The FBI reported that his first physical examination revealed a ‘syphilitic condition’ and ‘13 arsenical and 39 heavy metal injections’. He was rejected a number of times, partly because of his homosexuality, and then finally accepted in December 1942. When he was posted to the Mediterranean, Erika remarked that for the first time since their childhood he was almost happy. His parents came to see him off. He wrote in his diary: ‘At our farewell, Z. embraced me, something that had never happened before.’

  Klaus arrived in Germany the day after the surrender. He had believed that ‘when the Dictator has vanished – and only then, will it again be possible … to live in Germany, without fear and without shame.’ He now knew that wasn’t true. On 16 May 1945, he wrote to his father:

  It would be a very grave mistake on your part to return to this country and play any kind of political role here. Not that I believe you were harbouring any projects or aspirations of this kind. But just in case any t
empting proposition should ever be made to you … Conditions here are too sad. All your efforts to improve them would be hopelessly wasted. In the end you would be blamed for the country’s well-deserved, inevitable misery. More likely than not, you would be assassinated.

  When he revisited the shell of the family home in Munich, Klaus discovered that it had been used as a Lebensborn during the war, an Aryan knocking-shop, ‘a place where racially qualified young men and equally well-bred young women collaborated in the interest of the German nation … Many fine babies were begotten and born in this house.’ When he interviewed Richard Strauss for the army magazine Stars and Stripes, Strauss praised Hans Frank, who ran Auschwitz, since Frank, unlike Hitler, ‘really appreciated my music’. Klaus met Heinrich’s first wife, who had been released from Terezín, and their daughter, who had also been imprisoned. He didn’t believe that ordinary Germans were ignorant of what happened in the concentration camps. He wrote that he felt ‘a stranger in my former fatherland’.

  Erika arrived in Germany four months after Klaus. She wrote: ‘The Germans, as you know, are hopeless. In their hearts, self-deception and dishonesty, arrogance and docility, shrewdness and stupidity are repulsively mingled and combined.’ Bedford said of her: ‘Erika could hate, and she hated the Germans. You see, Erika was a fairly violent character. At one point during the war, she propagated that every German should be castrated. And vengeance – Klaus wasn’t like that at all. Erika was very unforgiving.’

  On her arrival in Munich, she registered a claim on the old family house, something that poor impractical Klaus had neglected to do. Her other task was to report on the Nuremberg Trials. She was the only one of the journalists allowed into the hotel where the Nazi leaders were being held. She let them know who she was. ‘To think that that woman has been in my room,’ Julius Streicher remarked. Goering had something more interesting to say. He explained that ‘had he been in charge of the “Mann case”, he would have handled it differently … Surely a German of the stature of Thomas Mann could have been adapted to the Third Reich.’ Erika reported that ‘when a slight thunderstorm had frightened Göring into an equally slight heart attack, the creator of the Blitz was given a mattress for his cot, and breakfast in bed.’ When she visited Hans Frank and Ribbentrop, ‘the Butcher of Poland was reading the Bible to the ex-champagne salesman’.