by Colm Toibin
“It is a pity,” Katia said, “that they are not being paid for their own achievements. If I read any more interviews with Erika, I shall release her abject letters begging for money to the press.”
* * *
More and more jokes were made about the confidence and callowness of the two older Mann siblings. A cartoon appeared of a young Klaus saying to his father: “I’m told, Papa, that the son of a genius is never a genius himself. Therefore, you can’t be a genius!” And Bertolt Brecht, who disliked Thomas, wrote: “The whole world knows Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann. By the way, who is Thomas Mann?”
Thomas and Katia failed to make sense sometimes of the confusion their two eldest children generated. When it was rumored that Klaus was engaged to Pamela Wedekind, Katia also learned that Erika herself was in love with Pamela.
“Perhaps they are sharing her,” Thomas said.
“I have never known Erika to share anything,” Katia replied.
Klaus, having written a novel about a homosexual character, then wrote a play about four young people, two boys and two girls, who followed no conventions. Since it was a family custom to have a reading after dinner, it was agreed that Klaus, who was visiting, could share his new work with the family, including his aunt Lula.
When Klaus had finished reading the play, Aunt Lula made plain her objection to the close sexual relationship between the two girls in the work.
“It is most unhealthy,” she said, “and I hope the play lives in obscurity. Thomas and Heinrich have written such nice books, and now these children, who should be in school, are writing whatever they like. I am trying to make sure that my daughters don’t see any of this.”
“The war is over, Lula,” Thomas said.
“Well, I don’t like the peace.”
Lula’s views were not shared by the well-known actor Gustaf Gründgens, star of the Kammerspiele in Hamburg, who offered to take one of the parts in Klaus’s play, suggesting the other male role be played by Klaus himself and the two young women by Erika and Pamela Wedekind.
Gründgens caused perplexity in the Mann household. Even Golo began to enjoy the different versions of where Gründgens’s affections lay. One day, news came via a letter from Klaus himself, who made no secret of his sexual proclivities, that he and Gründgens were in love. Soon afterwards, Erika wrote to say that she was going to marry Gründgens. On a visit home shortly after that, to the bewilderment of his parents and Golo, Klaus confided in them that, while his sister was engaged to Gründgens, she was, in fact, still in love with Pamela Wedekind and, while he himself was in love with Gründgens, he was still engaged to Pamela.
“Is this what everyone does before they get married?” Golo asked.
“No, it is not,” his mother replied. “Only Erika and Klaus.”
As the play Klaus wrote toured Germany, news of the complicated relationships among the four actors spread among journalists, who hinted in their articles that this theatrical work was based on the actors’ own lives.
“We plan a gala Munich opening,” Erika said. “And we need everyone there. Our success depends on it.”
“Ten horses will not drag me there,” Thomas said. “The newspapers can cover your activities with all the fervor in the world, but I will remain in my study and retire early on the evening in question.”
Thomas and Katia understood that they could do nothing to stop Erika and Klaus falling in love and getting engaged and acting in plays. For the most part, they found their two children’s behavior endearing, but they grew to dislike Gustaf Gründgens and wished they could alert Erika to their disapproval.
Gründgens, when Erika took him to her parents’ house, could not conceal how much he knew about them; he had all the details on the rift between Thomas and Heinrich during the war and made reference to the Manns’ dollar income. Gründgens was the first outsider to try to penetrate the golden circle that Erika and Klaus had created. While Thomas and Katia knew Pamela Wedekind from when she was a child, and while they were neighbors of the parents of Ricki Hallgarten, they did not know who Gustaf Gründgens was.
“I saw a man like him once on a train from Munich to Berlin,” Katia said. “He was all smiles, he could not have been sweeter, but when the ticket collector approached, it turned out he had no ticket.”
When Lula came to visit, flushed and excited, and then suddenly angry, she spoke further about the outrageous behavior of Erika and Klaus.
“I read an interview with Erika. It seems that she has no respect for authority. She said so in the interview.”
One afternoon, Klaus Pringsheim was sitting languidly having coffee with Thomas and Katia when Lula appeared. As Thomas noticed his brother-in-law taking Lula in, he wished the two of them could be kept apart.
“It is a joy to be alive,” Klaus said. “You have the Kaiser one year and then a free-for-all the next. That is called history.”
“That is not the name for it,” Lula said. “It is an outrage that people from good families are parading around Germany like clowns.”
“Erika and Klaus?” Klaus Pringsheim asked. “From good families?”
“Well, our family at least is highly respectable,” Lula said.
“Thank God, ours is not,” Klaus said, “so maybe a mismatch is at the heart of the problem.”
“I think Klaus is joking,” Katia said.
Lula’s cheeks had become red.
“What exactly do you do for a living?” she asked Klaus.
“I study music. Sometimes I conduct orchestras. I don’t do anything for a living.”
“You should be ashamed of yourself!”
“Shame is over,” Klaus said. “You go out at night in Munich and in Berlin and there is no more shame. It abdicated at the same time as the Kaiser. Since then it has been a feast of shamelessness.”
“That will be the end of Germany,” Lula said, getting more agitated.
“And would that not be a good thing?” Klaus asked.
Lula announced that she had to leave. She suddenly seemed tired, almost frail. She sat for a while staring straight ahead. For a moment, she looked as if she might fall asleep. Thomas had to help her to the door.
When he came back into the room, Klaus asked him if Lula was being looked after.
“What do you mean?” Thomas asked.
“Your sister looks to me like a woman who is enjoying the benefits of morphine.”
“Don’t be silly,” Katia said.
* * *
Soon Erika began wearing a suit and a tie. She and her brother, Thomas thought, resembled each other. They often spoke at the same time, both trying to say the same thing, making clear to Gründgens, if he were present, that he was an outsider in their world, that he would never understand their abstruse references, their intricate jokes or their resistance to any set of moral codes. They spoke in tones, Thomas thought, that deliberately excluded any newcomer. Why Erika wished nonetheless to marry him was something that neither Thomas nor Katia could fathom.
“It might be better if she marries no one,” Katia said.
Thomas was tempted to reply that it was a pity Erika could not marry her own younger brother Klaus. It would be one way of keeping Klaus under control. At first, he did not believe that she would go through with her marriage to Gründgens, even when she spoke about it as a task she had to complete, nothing too onerous, like an extra performance added due to public demand. But then an invitation came with a date set.
He and Katia went through the motions of attending the wedding. Thomas could not resist becoming more solemn and formal as the young people around him put on a display of jollity and silliness, giving women’s names to men and men’s to women, making many jokes that bordered on indecency. When Katia nudged him, he noticed that Klaus had his eyes closed and might have fallen asleep had an overdressed young woman not come up and asked him to dance. The same young woman later joined Thomas and Katia and informed them that Pamela Wedekind had stayed away out of jealousy.
“The honeymoon will be spent in a hotel at Lake Constance where Erika and Pamela recently had a divine love weekend,” the young woman said. “Gründgens was so jealous he tore what was to be Erika’s wedding dress to shreds. But she didn’t mind at all. She laughed, because she didn’t even like the dress, and that made it all much worse. In the honeymoon hotel, Pamela posed as a man, calling herself Herr Wedekind, and we all think now that Erika is going to sign the register as Herr Mann, if Gründgens will let her. He can often be very tedious.”
* * *
Erika started life with her new husband; Klaus remained with his family in Munich. During the day he was exhausted, but then, once supper began each evening, would fill the air with ideas and plans, speaking sometimes, Thomas noticed, to some invisible Erika. Working in the theater with Gründgens, he said, had depressed the three others. In life, Gründgens was dull; he had read very few books. He had no curiosity, no sparkle. But once he was on the stage, he could do anything. While Klaus and Erika and Pamela longed for the performance to be over so they could have supper together, Gründgens seemed greatly diminished once the lights came down. Over supper, he would become ordinary. If they stayed out late, he could be very boring indeed. But on the stage, he was magical. It was uncanny, almost alarming, Klaus said.
As he spoke, it struck Thomas that writing, for Klaus, was a dreary process compared to the excitement of doing other things. Klaus relished outings, parties, new people, chances to travel. He was not naturally drawn to the hard and hidden place where a subject was lured towards the light in a process that was like alchemy. Writing was something he did quickly. Despite his talent, Klaus was not, Thomas judged, an artist. He wondered how his son would live as he grew older, what he would do.
* * *
Klaus warned them that Erika’s marriage to Gründgens was a disaster from the start. When Klaus had dinner with them in Berlin, he said, Gründgens had produced a magazine cover with a picture of Klaus and Erika and Pamela Wedekind. He reminded them that the picture had, when taken, included him, but some editor, unimpressed by his lack of fame, had erased him. Clearly, he said, he was not important enough; the other three were the great actors, and he was not. Or maybe, he insisted, they were just the spoiled children of famous literary fathers, and he was not.
The entire evening had been spent, Klaus said, listening to Gründgens moan. By that time, Erika was already tired of him. He wanted her to ask her father to make representations to the management of various theaters on his behalf. Gründgens no longer wished to be merely an actor, Klaus told them, he wanted to run his own theater.
“When Erika comes home,” he said, “she will feel that she made a fool of herself marrying this man. We will all have to look after her.”
* * *
Thomas followed the news about Adolf Hitler without much interest. There had always been cranks and fanatics in Munich. It hardly mattered whether they were left-wing or right-wing. People spoke of Hitler when he was in prison and when there was speculation about releasing him and then deporting him to Austria. In the December 1924 elections, his party won only three percent of the national vote.
Thomas saw the German defeat in the war as the end of something. Since he himself had entertained views about the specialness of the German soul, he felt it his duty now to ban such phrases from his lexicon and from his mind. The more time he had spent on the novel, the more he was certain that he needed to become ironic and speculative about his own heritage.
When Heinrich and Mimi came to dinner, Thomas knew that Heinrich would declare Hitler a looming menace. His photograph, haranguing a crowd, was starting to appear regularly in many newspapers.
“There is something offensive about his face,” Thomas said.
“About all of him,” Mimi replied.
“Money is no longer money,” Heinrich said. “And this is unimaginable for most people. Anyone who can cast blame with a shrill voice will be listened to.”
“But no one is listening to Hitler,” Thomas said. “His so-called putsch was a disaster. He is a failed demagogue.”
“What do you think of him, Katia?” Mimi asked.
“I would like this Hitler to leave us alone,” Katia said. “Bavaria without him is bad enough. I can’t imagine what Bavaria with him would be like.”
* * *
Mimi reported that she now knew for a fact that Lula was taking morphine.
“She is still in that circle of women and what binds them together is the drug. They look out for each other, and make sure that supplies don’t run out. I have a friend whose sister was in the group.”
The next time Lula was in the house, she sat with glazed eyes and a nodding head. For a while, she slurred her words, but then, with a start, appeared to realize where she was and began to talk animatedly.
When she was accompanied by her daughters, she made sure that they paid as much attention to social niceties as she did. If she found one of them sitting in a pose that seemed to her less than formal, she immediately reprimanded the girl. She was strict about what to do on arrival and departure, demanding that others follow her in traditional words of greeting and number of kisses.
One day, when she was invited to lunch, she corrected Golo’s relaxed way of holding his knife and fork, as though she were a reverend mother. The smallest breach in how things should be done made her shake her head in sadness or raise her voice to deplore the general fall in standards.
“You can blame the war,” she said, “or the inflation, but I blame people themselves. It is people themselves who have bad manners. And sometimes the parents are worse than the children.”
“Do you mean my parents?” Golo asked.
“That is an example of the new rudeness I am talking about.”
When there was any possibility of Erika and Klaus being present, Lula would announce that she had forbidden her daughters from coming to Poschingerstrasse in case they would be influenced by their cousins’ lack of social seriousness.
“Erika has no feminine qualities,” she said. “How will she live? She looks like a man.”
“That is how she wishes to look,” Katia said.
“She is a very bad example to her sisters, to her cousins, and to young women in general.”
Since Heinrich moved in many levels of Munich society, he was informed that, even before Löhr’s death, Lula was having affairs with married men. She had been spotted making a scene at the front door of a well-known apartment building. At first, Thomas thought this was the sort of gossip that would surround the widowed sister of two famous writers. People could not content themselves, he believed, with saying nothing, knowing nothing, about Lula. In the place where literary Munich and its more respectable counterpart met, Lula would be noticed all the more not only because of her opinions, but because she was conspicuously running out of money.
Heinrich told them that he knew for certain that Lula had a lover who was being unfaithful to her. The man was married, but he could be seen in public places with a number of women other than his wife and Lula.
“His wife has long ceased to care,” Heinrich said, “but it is an open humiliation for Lula.”
Soon Heinrich told them that Lula had been seen following this man in the street, or entering cafés and restaurants checking if he was at one of the tables, and then sitting alone in a state of despondency as she gave his name and insisted that she would wait for him.
And then the news broke that Lula had taken her own life. When Heinrich arrived at the house to tell Thomas and Katia, she and Golo immediately went to comfort Lula’s daughters, but Heinrich and Thomas stayed behind, finding refuge in Thomas’s study.
Heinrich reminded him of the nights when their mother would tell them about her childhood in Brazil.
“Can you imagine on one of those nights if someone had come into the room and told our two sisters how they would die?” Thomas asked.
“When Carla went,” Heinrich continued, “part of me followed her. And now Lula
. Soon we will all be gone.”
* * *
In 1927 and 1928 there were reporters outside his house on the day that the Nobel Prize in Literature was being announced. The first year, Katia had the servants make them tea and give them cake, but the second year, she closed the shutters and ordered everyone to use the back entrance to the house.
“I detected a note of glee last year when it was announced that you hadn’t won.”
By 1929, Thomas and Katia dreaded the possibility that he might be awarded the prize. Since unemployment had once more gone over two million and since the name Hitler was on everyone’s lips, his meetings in Munich attended by thousands of people, they did not want to become public recipients of a large amount of money, nor did they want to add to the attention drawn to them by Erika and Klaus, whose invective against Hitler and his friends grew in proportion to the rise of Hitler’s popularity.
Thomas did not fully trust Erika and Klaus, or indeed his brother Heinrich, when they expressed alarm about Hitler and made clear their hatred of his followers. His brother and two eldest children, he felt, needed an enemy in Germany to rail against. In the morning, when he read the paper, he often found himself skimming over the news about Hitler, whose party was declaring a triumph in the local state and district elections having won just a few percent of the vote.
Golo, however, had begun to keep a file of cuttings about Hitler and the SA. After the Nuremburg rally in August 1929, he bought all the newspapers, some of which estimated the numbers in attendance at forty thousand, others at one hundred thousand. He put all the cuttings on the dining room table and invited his father to look at them.
