Authors: Max Egremont

Forgotten Land (26 page)

BOOK: Forgotten Land

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Klaip

da is one of the gateways to the Curonian Spit – the Kurische Nehrung in German or Kurši

Nerija in Lithuanian. You take a ferry across the lagoon, then a bus down the road at the centre of the peninsula, with pine woods on either side of you – and, through them, the sea to the north and the lagoon to the south. In late autumn the place is quite empty and the buses few and far between; in summer, visitors crowd onto a much more regular service, getting off to make for the long Baltic beaches to sunbathe or swim, although there are varying opinions about the cleanliness. Certainly the green lagoon, topped in places by
patches of brownish foam, is thickly polluted, and it’s hard to see how anyone could want, or survive, even a quick dip. It’s a place for escape into a dramatic landscape that’s at its most extreme when you get further south, to the dunes near the village of Nida (whose German name was Nidden) that stretch across the Russian border. This is ‘the Prussian Sahara’ that entranced the German novelist Thomas Mann.

Thomas Mann outside the Nidden house with four of his children.

Mann gave a talk to the Munich Rotary Club on 1 December 1931, entitled ‘My Summer House’. Visual appreciation came late to him – perhaps the reason, he said, that he could not adequately describe the primitive and fascinating appearance of the Spit, which the early nineteenth-century traveller Alexander von Humboldt placed on a par with Italy as somewhere one had to visit. So besotted was Mann on his first visit that he decided to build a house there – an idea that he and his wife Katia had previously had at Aswan in Egypt and St Moritz in Switzerland. He mentioned the southern aspect – the deep blue of the lagoon, the white
sails of the fishing boats, the brilliant sky, the pine trees (as in the Mediterranean) and even (on a clear day) a sense of the North African coast. The lagoon could be rough and dangerous, especially in autumn; there was the occasional very fierce storm in summer. The locals were not beautiful, Mann said, but they were kind and rare – Slav in looks, with blue eyes and strong cheekbones, toughened by a hard life, speaking Russian-accented German, Lithuanian and what was called Kurische, which, to Mann, had overtones of Sanskrit. The dunes were much greater than the dunes at Sylt: elemental not so much at their summits (although the views seem limitless) as in the ravines, where there was only sand and the sky.

Mann stressed the sense of being on the edge. Elk roamed, he said, through the woods, where the birch and conifers evoked Turgenev’s Russia, giving you the feeling that the two parts of Europe – west and east – were colliding. But perhaps the sea was the climax to what seemed to be an endless beach: the northern sea as Mann, who grew up beside the Baltic at Lübeck, had never known it, with towering waves and a west wind, strong and primitive, and a dangerous pulling tide. At the end of the talk, Mann urged his audience to come to Nidden, a place, he admitted, of drama rather than of ingratiating beauty. Nowhere else in Europe did he feel so far from Europe.

Thomas Mann’s new house at Nidden was another sign of the village’s position as a gathering point for artists; it was said that you could hear the talk of the Berlin literary cafés among the dunes, and
Buddenbrooks
was on sale in the little shops. But Mann was hardly seen in the town, toiling each morning over his massive novel
Joseph and His Brothers
or on speeches to be given at The Hague and Geneva. He was not only a writer who had won the Nobel Prize in 1929 but a political and social critic whose conservative and nationalistic
Reflections of an Unpolitical Man
had come out during the First World War. He had thought that Hindenburg should be made the wartime chancellor of Germany.

Thomas Mann’s extraordinary discovery of what, until 1919, had been entirely a part of his native Germany began in 1929, two years before his Munich talk. It’s hard now, perhaps, to appreciate the stature (in his own eyes as well as those of the world) of the German novelist or how interested people were in what he had to say. In August 1929, he descended from the mountain of his eminence to give an interview to the
Königsberger Allgemeine Zeitung
. He spoke of East Prussia, of the landscape and of the sea, of the woods and the ravines, how they seemed to fulfil ‘an old yearning’: how he wished to build a calm refuge there, for contemplation and proximity to nature. This most eastern part of Germany had thrilled him, perhaps partly through its bridge to the Slav world; here he thought of Tolstoy, in the ‘unbelievable landscape of dunes’, ‘splendid woods’, wild sea and idyllic beaches. Asked who he thought should win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930, Mann answered André Gide (a homosexual) or Sigmund Freud (a Jew), indicating how distant he was from National Socialism. The Fatherland would soon change irrevocably for him, not least here, in the east.

His first trip to East Prussia had arisen out of an invitation to speak to the Königsberg Goethe Society; he and his wife Katia also brought their youngest children for a four-week holiday by the sea. The Lithuanian Consul advised them to visit the village of Nidden, which since the war had been on the Lithuanian side of the frontier that divided the Curonian Spit. At Nidden, they stayed at Hermann Blode’s inn, a haunt of writers and artists like Freud, Lorenz, the architect Erich Mendelsohn, the painter Lovis Corinth. Mann, intrigued, already knew of the Spit through the writings of Alexander von Humboldt. He had read Agnes Miegel’s mesmeric poem, ‘Die Frauen von Nidden’, about mythical death and burial.

Shown a site on a nearby hill by Blode’s eventual successor, Ernst Mollenhauer, Mann decided to build a house there – a crazy idea, he admitted, for it might attract people to the village; the novelist knew the power of his name. Mollenhauer advised on an
architect from Memel who thought the house should be simple, like a fisherman’s dwelling. Back in Königsberg, Mann fantasized about an elk’s antlers on its walls and thought that the clear, still lagoon resembled the sea at Portofino in his beloved Italy. Germany seemed far away, even though the gliding school at Rossitten was quite near. Sometimes the silent gliders drifted above them and occasionally on walks you could hear the shouts from a militaristic sporting camp over the border. On the Nidden beaches, some of the boys wore swastikas on their shirts and jerseys.

The cost of the eleven-room house, with a veranda and a terrace, was met out of the Nobel Prize money and his books’ increased sales. On 16 July 1930, the Manns saw it for the first time, arriving by boat from Cranz on a wet, cold day that displayed the northern European rather than the North African side of the ‘Prussian Sahara’. In photographs, Thomas Mann wears a heavy, belted mackintosh and a floppy trilby-type hat, apparently irritated and tired in one close-up, then more genial as he looks straight at the camera from the front seat of the carriage that has come to meet them. The journey had shown Nidden’s remoteness from the two centres of Mann’s life – Munich, where he lived, and Berlin, Germany’s intellectual heart.

A large crowd welcomed the Nobel Prize winner, who, with his family, was driven to the Blode inn and then to the new house. A ninety-nine-year lease of the land had been arranged. The structure was a wooden building painted dark ochre with bright ‘Nidden blue’ shutters and pediments, the roof partly thatched and the gables crossed above in a heathen motif of carved horses’ heads; it had a comfortable panelled interior. Mann’s writing room was above the front door, with a view over the lagoon. From his room he could see a pine tree, some reeds and then the water: sometimes still and blue, like southern sea, or grey and rippling, or a greasy brown streaked with yellow light. On the terrace outside, he felt he was on a ship. Mann could be undisturbed here, protected from his panic about people, from the local interest in what became known as ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’.

Thomas Mann had a façade of dignity and stiffness and was seen by many, not least his own children, as cold. He hid what he called ‘the hounds in the basement’ – his self-doubt, anxiety and homosexual feelings – within an iron structure of work and the bourgeois life into which he had been born as the child of a rich Baltic business family. The Mann household in Munich reflected not only prosperity, with servants, a chauffeur (who became a spy for the Nazis) and secretaries, but also his own agonizing solitude. Sharing Nietzsche’s romantic idea that artists were sick, too weak for the world, Mann saw them as condemned to suffering and isolation. He had, however, tried to break this, to him, enforced detachment with a strong patriotic belief in what he thought of as uniquely German possibilities and ideals – different to British commercialism and the cool, rational French: a version of Agnes Miegel’s ‘terrible and great way’. The defeat of 1918 – and the chaos that followed – led to a crumbling in his mind of this conservative nationalism. In East Prussia, at his new holiday home, he saw yet more evidence that life for him in his beloved Fatherland was ending.

Mornings at Nidden were set aside for work. Mann told a Königsberg journalist that he wrote slowly, only one and a half narrow sides of quarto paper each morning: that his huge books –
Buddenbrooks
or
The Magic Mountain
– came from small ideas that grew uncontrollably, bursting out of the format of shorter masterpieces like
Tonio Kröger
and
Death in Venice
. So his routine became as firm as it had been in Munich: a short walk in the pine woods before breakfast: then several hours of work at his desk before joining his family on the beach.

Mann was no great swimmer. A photograph shows him with arms rigidly crossed, a cigarette drooping from grimly clenched lips, eyes joylessly fixed on the distance, his body swathed in a thick plaid robe that covered every possible part of it, his hair oiled and only slightly ruffled. After a plunge in the often rough Baltic, he would sit in a heavy beach chair, the only one of its kind that summer in Nidden, sometimes in more formal coastal wear
of a blue blazer with brass buttons, pale grey trousers, white shoes and peaked yachting cap. Mann liked to admire the almost naked bodies of the good-looking young men, imagining how the absurd Nazis would cherish their physique. On his knee was a pad, because work always came with him. After lunch he took a short nap before the dictation of letters to his wife; in his children’s early memories, the sound of the typewriter offered a soothing breach in the silence of the house. In the evenings Mann (‘the magician’) read aloud to his family or played cards with them, listened to music or to shocking radio reports about the economic crisis – or read his latest work to Katia.

Mann on the beach.