The Bitter Taste of Victory (10 page)

As Mann’s first proclamation after the end of the war, this speech carried great significance. The exiled philosopher Ludwig Marcuse later described Mann as the ‘Kaiser of all the German emigrants, and in particular the overlord of the tribe of writers’, stating that ‘everything was expected of him, he was credited with everything, he was made responsible for everything’. A Nobel-prize winner whose erudite novels carried great weight among both German and American intellectuals, Mann was now the foremost German man of letters in the US and an honoured guest at the White House.
¹⁸

During the war Mann had made broadcasts to the German public, urging them to turn away from Nazism. Now he was talking more specifically to the German writers and artists who had stayed. There
was a tendency for German artists to describe themselves using the term ‘inner emigrant’, implying that it was possible to remain physically present in Germany but to distance themselves mentally from the world around them, absenting themselves ideologically. Mann was aware that the months that followed would be dominated by a dialogue between the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’ emigrants in which both made a claim to have suffered more and sinned less than the other. He wanted to forestall this by emphasising the inevitable grey areas when it came to questions of guilt and blame and acknowledging that although he may now be an American citizen, he shared the guilty burden of his former countrymen.
¹⁹

Mann was right to include himself among the guilty. He had disappointed his brother, the novelist Heinrich Mann, with his own militarism in the First World War (at one point he celebrated the sinking of the 1,200 civilian passengers on board the British
Lusitania
) and had disappointed his most politicised children Erika and Klaus with his failure publicly to condemn the National Socialists in their early years of power. Although he had censured them when they came second in the 1930 German election and had resigned from the executive committee of the German Writers’ League in 1933, he had been reluctant to make the decisive breach that would lead to the banning of his work in Germany.

In 1933 Thomas Mann and his wife Katia followed Erika and Klaus into exile, frightened that their lives were endangered by Katia’s Jewishness and the radicalism of their elder children. Soon they would be joined by their remaining four children. But Mann’s ability to equivocate about even the most simple matters was part of his greatness, as was his determination to admit his most unpleasant feelings to himself. He observed in his diary in April 1933 that he was beginning to suspect that ‘in spite of everything this process is one of those that has two sides to them’. He was wondering if in fact ‘something deeply significant and revolutionary’ was taking place in Germany and thought that after all it was ‘no calamity’ that the domination of the legal system by the Jews had ended. This moment of anti-Semitism was not characteristic for Mann, who had never been troubled by his wife’s Jewishness. But he was prepared to consider the matter from multiple points of view.
²⁰

By May 1933 Mann had made up his mind enough to inform Albert Einstein that he was convinced that the ‘German Revolution’ was ‘completely wrong and evil’, but despite this new conviction, he hesitated, refusing to leave his German publishing house and even speaking out publicly against his son Klaus’s anti-Nazi émigré journal
Die Sammlung
. This was partly because he believed that as a great writer his foremost loyalty was to literature. After the Nazi putsch known as ‘The Night of the Long Knives’ in 1934, Mann wrote in his diary that he wished his heart could be colder, enabling him to be less disturbed by these events. ‘What does the history of the world matter to me, I probably ought to think, if only it lets me go on living and working?’
²¹

When Mann did finally make a political statement, it was not on behalf of the anti-fascist exiles but in defence of his Jewish publisher, who was attacked by an émigré newspaper as a Jewish protégé of Goebbels. It was Erika who forced a more decisive breach, insisting that the history of the world mattered. She found her father’s protest unacceptable and informed him that it was now going to be difficult for her to look him in the eye. Certain that the Jewish publisher had indeed compromised problematically with the regime, Erika told her father that it was time to choose between his daughter and his editor: ‘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 if 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.’

Thomas asked Erika for patience, but she had none left. Katia intervened, drafting an open letter to the newspapers that she demanded her husband should complete. Finally, in February 1936, Thomas Mann spoke out in an open letter to the anti-Semitic journalist Eduard Korrodi stating that German anti-Semitism was not just directed against the Jews but was directed ‘against Europe and against that higher Germanism itself’ and against the ‘classical foundations of Western morality’. National Socialism was creating ‘a ruinous alienation between Goethe’s country and the rest of the world’.
²²

Now, after his years of broadcasting to the Germans as a patriotic American, Mann had earned the right to berate his former countrymen for their foolishness. He was worried that they would continue to believe in their military superiority and urged them to see that this was a myth. In a delicate balancing act, Mann reprimanded his former countrymen while not removing himself from blame. The Germans (and he included himself in the first person plural) needed to ‘enhance our modesty’ by recognising the superior military skill of the Allies. The impossible task now confronting Mann was to join the conquerors from his adopted country in convincing his former compatriots of their guilt, without shirking his responsibility as a German writer.
²³

Mann’s sons Golo and Klaus were enlisted in the Allied army whose military skill he was commending, though admittedly as reporters rather than as combatants. Since the start of the war, both men had been committed to helping defeat the Nazis physically as well as intellectually. In May 1940, Golo Mann had put on hold his career as an academic historian to volunteer with the Red Cross in France. He was almost immediately imprisoned in a French concentration camp, though he was released after three months with American help and escaped across the Pyrenees to Lisbon and then to America, accompanied by his uncle Heinrich.
²⁴
A year later, once the US had entered the war, Klaus Mann attempted to enlist in the army. After being repeatedly rejected by military authorities who were doubtful about his health and his sexual orientation, Klaus feigned some heterosexual lust, pointing out the desirability of the bosom of a girl outside the window, and was accepted as an American soldier in 1942.

Following years as an outsider, he was delighted to be defending his new homeland. ‘We German refugees . . . were eager to contribute our bit to the fight against the Brown Plague,’ he said later; ‘I was happy and proud therefore, to join the army of my new country, the United States of America.’ In 1943 Golo was able to enlist as well, working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington and then making radio commentaries for the German language division of the American
Broadcasting Station in London and then Luxembourg, informing the Germans about the bombing of their cities from across the border.
²⁵

Klaus Mann’s unit had been in Europe since the spring of 1943 and he was currently stationed in Italy working for the Psychological Warfare section. His task was to report on the war for
Stars and Stripes
and to give speeches on loudspeakers urging the German troops in Italy to surrender. ‘Do you want to die for a lost cause?’ he had asked them in January. ‘Why do you still lie in the dirt out here risking your lives?’ There was coffee and buttered bread waiting for them in the American POW camp. But although he dissociated himself from the foolishness of the German soldiers, Klaus like his father had returned mentally to his former homeland during the months of its protracted defeat. While in Italy, he had received intermittent letters from Erika describing her adventures in Aachen and he was now eagerly trying to persuade his superiors that it was time for him to go back to Germany as well.
²⁶

For Klaus Mann the desire to return to Germany was bound up with his feelings of ambivalent closeness towards his father and elder sister. He minded deeply that Erika was seeing the ruins of their homeland without him. ‘It’s an eternal pity that we can’t explore German cities together,’ he complained. Now he wanted to return to the country where they had grown up, both to make sense of his own past and to regain the bond with his sister that he worried he was in the process of losing.
²⁷

Since childhood, the two eldest Mann siblings had been so close that they were frequently mistaken for twins or lovers. In fact Erika was a year older than the brother she affectionately knew as ‘Eissi’ and both were more often attracted to their own sex. None the less, their relationship had the quality of a marriage. As children, they remained apart from their four younger siblings and their schoolmates, embedded in an endlessly proliferating make-believe world. Outsiders were struck by the exclusivity of their uncompromising intelligence and by their androgyny. Erika was a tomboy with dark messy hair; Klaus was girlishly lovely with shoulder-length blond curls.

When it seemed time to leave bourgeois Munich for bohemian Berlin, they went together, Klaus aged seventeen and Erika aged
eighteen. What was more, they fell in love together, creating an incestuous quartet held together primarily by the siblings’ own tight bond. Aged eighteen, Klaus proposed to Pamela Wedekind (daughter of Frank Wedekind, a well-known and scandalous playwright) who was Erika’s lover at the time.
²⁸
Klaus’s 1924 play
Anja and Esther
was written for his sister and his fiancée and explored the relationships of ‘a neurotic quartet of four boys and girls’ who are ‘madly in love with each other, in the most tragic and mixed up fashion’. Two years later the rising star Gustaf Gründgens invited Klaus to stage the play in Hamburg, suggesting that he and Klaus take on the roles of the two boys.
²⁹

Gründgens was handsome, shabby and ambitious. He was as impressed by Klaus’s elevated background as Klaus was by his new friend’s self-confident charm. The two men fell in love, with Gründgens publicly pronouncing Klaus as the poet of the younger generation and proposing marriage to Erika. Pamela did not attend her lover’s wedding and Erika and her husband honeymooned at a hotel where Erika and Pamela had holidayed one month earlier with Pamela passing herself off as a man. Gründgens was supportive of Erika’s acting career but his relationship with Klaus was becoming more rivalrous than loving; Klaus’s parentage became problematic when it eclipsed Gründgens’ own stardom. When
Anja and Esther
opened in Hamburg, Germany’s most popular magazine,
Die Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung
, ran a feature on the quartet that focused chiefly on the illustrious parentage of the Manns and Wedekind and cropped Gründgens out of the photograph featured on the cover. It was unsurprising that both the love affair and the marriage were over within three years, although Klaus remained irritably obsessed with Gründgens and would use his estranged lover as the model for his portrayal of a self-serving actor who sells his soul to the fascist Devil in his 1936 novel
Mephisto
.
³⁰

The Mann siblings’ commitment to bohemianism was partly a reaction against their parents, whom they believed had both failed to fulfill their early radical promise. In 1901 aged twenty-six, Thomas Mann had shocked his family with his damning portrayal of his bourgeois childhood world in
Buddenbrooks.
In 1903, Katia Pringsheim had been the first female student to enroll in the University of Munich. Meeting
Thomas shortly after this, she initially attracted him with her haughty refusal to produce her ticket on a tram. But in Klaus and Erika’s view, their parents had succumbed to respectability in marrying each other. Katia abandoned her studies to become the quiet wife of a great man and Thomas remained sexually only partially fulfilled, knowing that he was primarily homosexual. Erika and Klaus were determined to avoid the unhappy compromises of their parents, although both would always feel compelled to seek their father’s approval.