Klaus (10 page)

Some years ago in Paris I bought the two volumes of the French edition of Klaus Mann’s journals. They don’t pretend to be a work of literature, but offer a record of his daily life, high-spirited in the pre-Hitler years, despondent but resilient in his years of exile as he flitted from country to country, hotel to hotel, always writing and carrying on the struggle against the Nazis, “the Brown Plague”. Despite being often little more than jottings, records of engagements and notes on his reading, they reveal an attractive character and offer a vivid picture of intellectual life in the Europe of the 1930s.

I found myself drawn to Klaus, the more so the more I learned about his troubled and often disappointing life. I read his novels and memoirs, sought out references to him in other books. It was becoming an obsession, and for a writer there is only one way to be rid of such a thing.

I knew from the first that my book would be a novella dealing with his last days in the miserable wet spring of 1949. It might run to thirty thousand words, a difficult length to publish, but agreeable to write, long enough to say what I wanted to say, short enough to be read at a sitting.

Some of it draws from Klaus’s own writings, freely adapted. Such are the scenes in which he remembers seeing Hitler in the Carlton Tea Rooms in Munich in 1932, his memories of Gustaf Gründgens, and his post-war meetings with Emil Jannings, Richard Strauss and André Gide. Much is of my own invention. Klaus knew and liked Somerset Maugham, but the lunch at his Villa Mauresque is a product of my imagination. So are several of the characters, notably the Swedish boy who to my surprise walked into my book and Klaus’s life in Chapter XI.

In his last months Klaus was trying to write a novel to be called
The Last Day
. According to Andrea Weiss, author of
In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The
Erika and Klaus Mann story
, it “was conceived as two parallel plots, one concerning a cosmopolitan New Yorker, named Julian Butler… the other concerning a writer in East Berlin, named Albert Fuchs… Only a few pages exist from this unfinished novel…”

I haven’t read them, and the passages of the novel embedded in my narrative, are my own invention, what I think Klaus might have written.

I am indebted to Andrea Weiss for her sympathetic study of Klaus and Erika, the sister he adored, and have also drawn on Hermann Kurtzke’s biography of Thomas Mann. The table (p. 78) listing the qualities or attributes of homoeroticism and married love is Thomas Mann’s, from his essay “On Marriage” originally entitled “Marriage in Transition”.

© Allan Massie 2010

This edition published in May 2014 by Vagabond Voices Publishing Ltd., Glasgow, Scotland.

E-book edition published in May 2014

ISBN 9781908251381

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

Cover design by Mark Mechan

For further information on Vagabond Voices, see the website, www.vagabondvoices.co.uk