New Ways to Kill Your Mother (26 page)

Even as late as March 1920 Mann was unrepentant. ‘Heinrich’s position,’ he wrote, ‘no matter how splendid it appears at the
moment, is basically already undermined by events and experiences. His orientation towards the West, his worship of the French, his Wilsonism etc are antiquated and withered.’

In his biography of Mann, published in 1999, Hermann Kurzke traces the ironies, the contradictions and the changes of opinion in Mann’s politics between 1918 and 1922, when, in a speech called ‘The German Republic’, he seemed to recant. Kurzke writes that Mann, in these years, developed friendships, some of them close, with figures such as Ernst Bertram, Elisabeth Mann’s godfather, who later became supporters of the Nazis or fellow-travellers with the regime. Kurzke is cautious, however, about making too much of this:

Does that make Thomas Mann a precursor of Fascism? He certainly made an effort to stay out of the way of the resurgent right-wing movement of the time. Very early on in the summer of 1921, he took note of the rising Nazi movement and dismissed it as ‘swastika nonsense’. As early as 1925 when Hitler was still imprisoned in Landsberg, he rejected the cultural barbarity of German Fascism with an extensive, decisive and clearly visible gesture.

In May 1933, when ‘un-German’ books were being burned, Heinrich Mann’s were on the bonfire. Thomas Mann’s were not. He was still being protected by Bertram, among others. But his main protection was his own silence. When the first issue of
Die Sammlung
appeared, it had a provocative essay by Heinrich Mann and an editorial by Klaus: ‘The true, valid German literature … cannot remain silent before the degradation of its people and the outrage it perpetrates on itself … A literary periodical is not a political periodical … Nevertheless, today it will have a political mission. Its position must be unequivocal.’

Goebbels, in retaliation, stripped Heinrich of his citizenship, and the following year Klaus, too, was declared stateless. In 1935, five days after her marriage to W. H. Auden, her second husband, Erika
was also stripped of her citizenship. (Auden seemed to get infinite amusement from his relationship with the Manns. ‘What else are buggers for?’ he replied when asked why he had married the soon-to-be-stateless Erika. ‘I didn’t see her till the ceremony and perhaps I shall never see her again,’ he wrote to Stephen Spender. ‘Who’s the most boring German writer? My father-in-law.’ He said about Klaus: ‘For an author, sons are an embarrassment, as if characters in his novel had come to life.’)

Thomas Mann confined his views on what was happening in Germany to his diary. On 10 April 1933 he wrote:

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, was 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?’