Der Spiegel recently described the great German writers Thomas and Heinrich Mann and their progeny thus: “egocentric and self-deprecating, half-bound to one another, sexually irregular, the representatives of a different Germany. . . . [Today] Thomas Mann’s family seems astonishingly modern.” No one lived up to those words more than Thomas Mann’s eldest son, Klaus: writer, lecturer, provocateur, world traveler, anti-Nazi militant, largely underrated during his lifetime, but lately something of a cult figure in a reunited Germany. Now comes Frederic Spotts, a retired American diplomat and distinguished man of letters in his own right (Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics and The Shameful Peace), to introduce this remarkable man to American readers.
To read this book is to plunge into a world utterly unlike our own, where writers occupied almost oracular positions in European society and where the European countries major and minor were torn apart by revolutionary (or counterrevolutionary) ideologies and movements, and then rent by the Second World War and the beginnings of the Cold War. It also casts light on a United States long since disappeared. In the case of Klaus Mann, one major burden to be negotiated is the fact that, as a writer, he was always under the shadow of a famous father and uncle; the other, that his political independence and nonconformity forced him into exile at a remarkably early age.
Born in 1906 to a well-to-do family (thanks to his mother’s dowry), by the time Klaus was old enough to start writing himself his father was a Nobel laureate and one of the leading figures of European literature. At his father’s dinner table he could eavesdrop on the conversations of Hermann Hesse, Bruno Walter, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gustav Mahler, Max Liebermann, and Stefan Zweig. Inevitably he began writing as soon as possible, bursting into prominence at the age of 19 with his first novel, Der fromme Tanz (1926), the first openly gay novel in German literature. By 1932, at 26, he had published four plays, two additional novels, three volumes of short stories, even a precocious autobiography (Kind dieser Zeit), not to mention over a hundred essays and two travel books in collaboration with his sister Erika.
Cashing in on his early success and notoriety as “the precocious son of a distinguished father,” Klaus and his sister Erika went on a lecture tour of the United States, though neither could speak much English at the time. Traveling as far west as Hollywood, Mann allowed as how he liked Americans, although he found them “shockingly wholesome.” He and Erika returned to Germany by way of Hawaii, Korea, China, and the Soviet Union. The latter was on the verge of entering its long Stalinist ice age, and the writing was already on the wall for artists and intellectuals. The visit left Klaus and Erika “perplexed and saddened,” which Spotts claims (not wholly accurately) inoculated young Mann against “the blind pro-communism of many Western intellectuals in those years.”
Such notoriety at an early age invited envy and contempt by more established German intellectuals. It also created a distance between Klaus Mann and his father, whose literary and personal styles were wholly conventional. Indeed, the list of unfriendly critics reads like a Who’s Who of Weimar culture. There is Kurt Tucholsky’s barb, for example, that “Klaus sprained his right arm writing his hundredth publicity bulletin and will be unable to keep his speaking engagements in the weeks to come.” From early on, Spotts explains, Klaus was derided less by the Nazis and the political right (which tended to ignore him) than by the left, the Social Democrats no less than the Communists.
The rise of Hitler took Mann by surprise. He never really regarded him seriously—”not with that nose!” he wrote in The Turning Point (1942)—but almost immediately after the Reichstag fire he recognized the danger and departed for Paris, not returning to Germany until after World War II. For the next decade he changed countries several times: the Netherlands, France, and Czechoslovakia, whose president awarded him a passport when Germany revoked his citizenship in 1934. There were visits to the United States to lecture on the coming threat of Nazism and war, by now in an English which was becoming fluent. Indeed, after 1939, he basically ceased to write in German at all, becoming perhaps the only exile writer of his generation to master English prose.
Withal, Klaus Mann was an unhappy soul. He never pleased his father, who was often scandalized by his personal conduct and uncompromising public positions. But at the same time, almost to the end of his life, he remained dependent on parental subsidies to survive. He developed an early addiction to various drugs—Spotts produces a bewildering list of substances—which he never overcame. He was also what today would be called an Out and Proud Homosexual at a time when such conduct was illegal in most countries, including Britain and most American states. His sex life as described here makes for sordid reading; fleeting affairs, none very long-lasting, punctuated by anonymous sexual adventures as a form of recreation and release. He had a tendency to argue with people over politics and, although he was on the right side of the issues, was probably something of a pain.
Above all, one gets the sense of endless energy, dedicated both to politics and culture in the broadest sense. After the Munich agreements, Mann quit Europe for the United States, where many were either blind to his warnings or ideologically committed to pacifism. (There are some unflattering descriptions here of Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden, not to mention of Communists and fellow-travelers who had suddenly discovered, during the period of the Hitler-Stalin pact, the unique evils of British imperialism, against which no foe could be wholly wrong.) When the United States entered the war, Mann chose to enlist as a private in the U.S. Army, which was not as easy as one might imagine. The FBI’s background check supposedly revealed him to be “a communist pervert.” Not until 1943, when American forces were running short of manpower, was he allowed to serve, first as an ordinary soldier and then as a correspondent in the European theater for Stars and Stripes.
While all of this was happening, Mann never ceased to write. His most famous book, Mephisto (1936), published by the polyglot publisher Querido in the Netherlands, is a devastating portrait of an actor who, formerly left-wing, comes to terms with the Nazis and becomes a favorite of the Prussian prime minister (never actually named in the book but obviously Hermann Göring). This novel, a roman à clef based on the real-life experiences of Gustav Gründgens, Mann’s former brother-in-law, never appeared in West Germany during Mann’s lifetime, though it is today one of the period’s classics, brought to the screen in 1981 by the Hungarian director Istvan Szabo, with the German actor Klaus Maria Brandauer in the title role.
This was followed by a huge portmanteau novel on the tragedy of German exile, Der Vulkan, which also appeared in Amsterdam just before the German invasion in 1940 and disappeared for years thereafter. By this time, of course, Mann was living in the United States. In 1942, just as he was going into the Army, an American publisher brought out his second volume of autobiography, The Turning Point. The characters of Der Vulkan, driven to unfriendly or inhospitable countries, constantly speculate on what kind of Germany there will be when Hitler is gone. But once the Third Reich actually collapsed, Mann had to come to terms with the fact that the country could not simply pick up where it had left off in 1932.
This part of Cursed Legacy is particularly useful in understanding the ambivalence which many sensitive and liberal Germans, whether in exile or not, felt towards the division of the country in 1945 and the coming of the Cold War. I find Spotts’s description of “anti-Communist hysteria” a bit overwrought, insofar as the years 1945-48 are concerned. But the division of the country into eastern and western sectors, against the background of increasing superpower tensions, inevitably led the occupying authorities to cast a blind eye on the political antecedents of the people with whom they had to deal.
As long before as the Saar plebiscite (1935), Klaus Mann had concluded that Hitler enjoyed genuine popularity in Germany, something which many other exiles—caught up in Marxist theories of fascism and “big business”—were loath to admit. In the immediate postwar period, if one began from the assumption that most Germans were sincere followers of Hitler, many to the very end, there were obvious practical limits to denazification. “The Germany of 1945,” writes Spotts, “was not a Germany he knew or wanted to know.” But efforts to establish himself elsewhere in Europe, particularly in Italy, where he attempted a collaboration with the director Roberto Rossellini, came to nothing. The 1948 Communist coup in Czechoslovakia hit him especially hard, as did the probable suicide of Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk.
Without a publisher, or even a language in which he could write for a public ready to read him, Klaus Mann retired to the French watering hole of Sanary-sur-Mer near Marseilles, where he died in 1949 from a drug overdose. At age 43, he had already lived several lifetimes.
Mark Falcoff is a writer and translator in Munich and Washington.
