The 40s: The Story of a Decade (63 page)

In March, 1933, two weeks after the Reichstag fire and two months after Hitler had assumed power as
Reichskanzler
, Mann and his wife, who were concluding a holiday in Switzerland, received a cryptic warning from their eldest son and daughter, Klaus and Erika, telephoning from the family house in Munich. These modern young Manns, already politically prescient, begged their parents not to come home because the weather was bad. Mann naïvely replied that the weather was bad in Switzerland, too. Erika then alluded to some terrible house-cleaning ahead. It was probably Frau Mann who realized that the weather the young Manns had described was political and that the house-cleaning might be a purging of anti-Nazis. Mann and his wife never set foot in
Germany again. The next day their six sons and daughters made preparations to join them and the voluntary exile of the Mann family began. When, a short time afterward, Mann’s passport expired and he asked the local German consulate to have it renewed, he was politely assured this would be done immediately if he returned to Munich. It was his refusal to go back home that made his anti-Nazi attitude official in Nazi eyes.

By the end of the year, Mann’s Munich house, library, and bank account had been seized by the Nazis. Late in 1936 the Nazi government deprived Mann and his family, who had remained in Switzerland, of their German nationality. It is characteristic of Mann that only in 1937, after the University of Bonn revoked the honorary degree of Doctor of Philosophy it had conferred upon him, did he break the four-year silence that marked the first stage of his exile. He had thought silence “would enable me to preserve something dear to my heart—the contact with my public in Germany”; that is, the continued circulation of his books there and what he steadfastly hoped would be their influence on German minds. On New Year’s Day, 1937, Mann addressed to the dean of the philosophical faculty of the University of Bonn his first public political words of excoriation of the Nazi regime—an indignant three-thousand-word letter, since reprinted in a pamphlet called “An Exchange of Letters,” which has been ranked as the noblest of Mann’s political statements. His other confessions of democratic faith are
The Coming Victory of Democracy
, hopefully written in the spring of 1938;
This Peace
, which appeared after Munich; and, a tragical third,
This War
, published early in 1940.

When Mann and his family lost their nationality, they were given honorary citizenship, by the Czecho-Slovakian Republic, as an anti-Nazi gesture. Actually, they never lived in Czecho-Slovakia; when they left Switzerland, they lived for a while in Le Lavandou and neighboring towns in the French Midi, and then settled down at Küsnacht, on the Lake of Zurich. Early in 1938, Mann received an offer from an American lecture bureau to visit the United States and go on tour. He accepted the invitation. As he had written to the dean of the University of Bonn, “I am more suited to represent [Germany’s cultural] traditions than to become a martyr to them.”

In the latest stage of his political evolution, Mann is now discussed in certain foreign diplomatic circles of Washington as the ideal president of the Fourth Reich, once the Nazis are defeated.

· · ·

As current events have made him feel increasingly remote from life, Mann, since his arrival in America, has gone out little, either to social functions, concerts, the movies (though movies fascinate him as something new under the sun), or the theatre. He was much interested in Robert Sherwood’s
There Shall Be No Night
last year and went to see it because he had heard he was the model for the character of the Finnish neurologist. If this were true, he said, he was much honored, but he thought the resemblance slight. He has read some American writers, is especially impressed by John Dos Passos and the early Ernest Hemingway, has recently enjoyed Frederic Prokosch, James M. Cain’s
Serenade
, John Steinbeck’s
Of Mice and Men
, and was at one time excited by Sinclair Lewis’s
It Can’t Happen Here
, considered as a document rather than as a literary production. Mann says he is glad his sons and daughters are in an English-speaking country because he thinks that English will be the only literary language that will remain free in the immediate future. Since it was not a language he learned to read with ease when he was young, as he did French, which interests him less, Mann is today driven to revert, for his regular afternoon reading after his nap, to his favorites, the German classics. He reread Goethe’s
Faust
five times hand running to get himself into what he considered the correct modern equivalent of the eighteenth-century mood in which to start writing his three novels about Joseph of the Old Testament days.

This trilogy, begun in 1926 and planned as a single book to be called
Joseph and His Brothers
, as time went on overflowed into
Young Joseph
and then into
Joseph in Egypt
, which itself ran into two volumes, and is now spreading into a tetralogy with a volume devoted to Jacob, on which Mann is working in California, where he now lives. The Joseph series (an elaboration, with symbolic commentary, of the familiar Biblical story, plus additional scholarly incidents Mann has culled from the Talmud) has, for the first time in Mann’s career, put his American devotees into two frames of mind. Some say it reminds them of Shakespeare’s
King Lear
and some merely say they can’t read it. The nub of the argument seems to be the lengthy episode involving Potiphar’s wife, treated by Mann with a candor which makes of it either the
Three Weeks
of the Old Testament or a remarkable study in Teutonic good-and-evil symbolism, depending on how the reader takes it. Some Mann readers also
deplore his characteristic humorous effort in making Potiphar’s wife lisp during the major seduction scene, owing to her having symbolically bitten her tongue in a preliminary attempt not to declare her passion. However, most readers, even the uncritical, agree that Potiphar’s wife finally saying (in the English translation) “Thleep with me” is definitely funny.

Among European writers of intellectual stature, Mann has outsold the field in America.
Joseph in Egypt
was a Book of the Month Club dividend in 1938, and over 210,000 copies were distributed apart from its bookstore sale of about 47,000.
Buddenbrooks
has sold about 48,000 copies in America and has just been put on phonograph records for the blind and placed in the twenty-seven regional libraries for the blind by the Library of Congress.
The Magic Mountain
, best known of his books among Americans, has sold more than 125,000 copies.
Death in Venice
, possibly the most beloved of his stories in this country, nevertheless had an original sale (accounted for, apparently, by only his most steadfast followers) of less than 20,000. However, it was included in
Stories of Three Decades
, which was also a Book of the Month Club dividend in 1936 and which sold 92,000 altogether. Even before this war, Mann’s largest group of readers was, owing to the Nazis’ suppression of his work, already concentrated in the United States; the Scandinavians ranked next. He has been alternately admired and suppressed by official Moscow. When the Revolution broke out he was unprintable because he was a bourgeois. After the rise of the Popular Front in France, the Soviet State publishing house brought him out in a handsome cheap edition. Just before the Berlin-Moscow pact was signed, his books began to be attacked again.

It is impossible to estimate how large a fortune Mann had assembled from his writings when the Nazis seized his worldly goods. Before the exile of the Mann family, they lived in a pleasantly prosperous manner (a country summer cottage in Memelland, the town house in Munich, automobiles, travel, six children, and vacations), a state of ease to which few German intellectuals, or even businessmen, could attain. For his American residence, Mann is now building a comfortable California type of house in a section called the Riviera, near Hollywood. His attitude toward his royalties is influenced by the fact that he believes he has a message to give to the world. Thus he has always given the sales of his books the dignified consideration which a prophet, say, would bestow upon his converts. Last year, after his
vie romanciée
about Goethe had been announced to bookshops under the title of
The Beloved Returns
,
Mann became uneasy and decided that he preferred to go back to the original, less sentimental title, “Lotte in Weimar.” To this Mann’s publisher, Alfred Knopf, agreed, but pointed out that many American Mann readers would lack the courage to ask a clerk for a book whose three-word title contained two words they wouldn’t be sure how to pronounce, whereas all would know how to ask for
The Beloved Returns
without embarrassment. After a dignified family parley of several days, Mann announced that he had decided he owed those readers waiting for his new book the courtesy of a title they would be sure of. The book was published under the title
The Beloved Returns
, with the subtitle “Lotte in Weimar.” Everyone, presumably including his readers, was happy.

· · ·

Perhaps because of his weighty personality, which, like an old-fashioned, heavily corniced library wall, rises solidly and protectingly behind the unfrivolous print of his thirty carefully written books, Thomas Mann now occupies a unique position in our country, superior to that of all the thousands of other German émigrés, intellectual or once monied, gathered here today. This position, which in three years has become legendary, he acquired partly because he takes his symbolic eminence for granted and partly because his proud racial character has served as a magnet to a company of compatriot refugees who, sick of being ashamed of their nationality, take comfort from the pride of this German gentleman whom they may never have seen, from this German author whose books they may never have read. Mann is also symbolic of those stay-at-home German generations which so carefully, unconsciously, and fatally helped bring about his own logical exile from his fatherland. As he recently wrote to his eldest daughter and son, “German freedom and the Weimar Republic have been destroyed; we, you and I, are not altogether guiltless in that matter.” Maybe Weimar’s Goethe, Mann’s mirror, should also have been included in his roomy
mea culpa.
There is no question but that Mann successfully managed to do what most authors would have tried to avoid—he projected himself backward into history as part of his literary progress in life. Already, by his blood inheritance, bred to look like a medieval portrait of a merchant by Holbein, Mann, because of a nineteenth-century literary affectation, concentrated his young writer’s mind on the eighteenth-century Goethe. With the coming of the twentieth century and its hesitant political notions, Mann, as the result of his tardy taste for politics, derived his ideological shape from the bourgeois
epoch, the
Grundjahre
of Bismarck, from which the world had just emerged and which the anti-Wilhelmenian young Germans were already trying to shed. Even in his choice of physical residence, Mann, as a domestic character, was equally elegant and démodé, selecting for his marriage and his home the soothing pleasures and academic intellectualities of Munich, capital of delicious old rococo and witty neo-baroque, a city busy with sentimental dreams, devoid of factories, and miles south of the colder industrial atmosphere of brutal Berlin. It is probable that exile alone has finally imposed on Thomas Mann the tragedy of being up to date.

Friends say that Mann suffers deeply from being an émigré, cut off from his country, his people, and his language. Wherever history has moved him, from Munich to Zurich, to Le Lavandou, to Stockton Street in Princeton, to the coast of California, he has tried, with civilized design, to go on living as himself. Some refugees are chameleons, taking their color from what lies around them; Mann is of the snail type, with his self-formed dwelling firm upon his head wherever he may be forced to roam. “I shall always go home,” one refugee friend of his has said, “to the house of Thomas Mann in whatever land. There our sadness as aliens is admitted; our homesickness is admitted, our sometimes outbursting love for German language and music—these are admitted. He is our most important, consoling figure. His writing, his art, his wisdom, his life have not been doomed by human circumstances.”

Whatever the circumstances, Mann himself, now in his middle sixties, does not think he will endure them long. Accustomed to deciding the destinies of characters in ink, he has decided what will be for him (in the phrase he always places at the end of each of his manuscripts) the
finis operis.
In his autobiographical
Sketch of My Life
he states, without comment, “I have a feeling that I shall die at the same age as my mother, in 1945.”