The Bitter Taste of Victory (11 page)

Neither Klaus nor Erika felt obliged to marry each other’s lovers again but in 1935 when Erika needed to marry an Englishman to gain a British passport, it was to a homosexual man that she turned. She met the British poet W. H. Auden through his collaborator the novelist Christopher Isherwood, who had become a friend in Amsterdam. Worried that her German citizenship would soon be revoked, she asked Isherwood to marry her. Squeamish about marriage and anxious about the safety of his own German male lover, Isherwood cabled to London to ask Auden to do it instead. Erika Mann and Wystan Auden married in June 1935, with Erika sporting a man’s tailored suit and jacket as her second bridal costume.

Erika made it clear with her attire that she like Klaus remained part of a bohemian world of outsiders that excluded her parents and their respectable literary circle. However the bond between the siblings was loosening and this was painful for them both. Erika found her brother’s dependence on drugs increasingly estranging as it became evident that his chemical experiments of the 1920s had developed into an addiction to a revolving combination of morphine, cocaine and heroin. ‘Don’t take any more “tuna” [heroin],’ Erika commanded Klaus in a letter in 1937; ‘It is unhealthy! It is expensive! It is dangerous! Don’t you recognise that?’ In the same letter she acknowledged the growing distance between them, saying that ‘we are too far removed from one another and it gnaws at my marrow’.
³¹

Erika and Klaus none the less continued to lecture together in the late 1930s and co-authored two books about Germany and the Germans. In
The Other Germany
(1940) they analysed Nazism as a German disease, suggesting that it had ‘deep roots in the character and psyche of the stricken nation’, at the same time as they pleaded for the recognition of
an Other Germany, the enlightened land that had produced great music, philosophy and literature. But the gulf between the siblings increased as they pursued their separate wars. Erika left for London in the summer of 1940 as a correspondent for the BBC, convinced of the need to ‘leave behind my beautiful, cosy American lifestyle’ and enter a war zone. Klaus, missing his sister desperately, chose not to follow her but to found another literary journal,
Decision,
which launched in 1941 with an editorial where Klaus defended his right to start a literary magazine at such a perilous time. The Nazis had put culture itself in danger. What was needed to combat them was ‘a new forum for the creative spirit –
now,
at precisely this moment of fatal decisions’.
³²

For Klaus it seemed essential that his magazine should be published in the US. That land that Erika had seen as irresponsibly beautiful and cosy was for Klaus ‘the last haven of free thought and free expression’. This was an old debate. These were the battle lines that had separated Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, that now divided the British artists who had moved to America – Klaus’s brother-in-law W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Benjamin Britten – from the friends they had left behind in London.
³³

Klaus quickly abandoned his own position. Unlike Auden and Isherwood he was not a pacifist. He had told Isherwood early in the war that although he could not conceive of killing anyone himself, he was convinced that if you allowed the Nazis to continue unrestricted you would let civilisation itself be destroyed. In 1941 he had argued with Auden on the radio, pleading for activism among artists where Auden maintained that poets and writers should avoid taking a political stance. By joining the US army, he went one step further than his sister in committing to the war effort. Now he was embedded even more deeply in the war than she was, but still the rift between them grew as their war experiences diverged and letters went missing or remained unwritten.
³⁴

The distance between the siblings was reflected by Erika’s choice of lovers. Since emigrating to the US in 1936, she had become chiefly heterosexual and kept her male lovers apart from Klaus. In 1941 she had fallen in love with the sixty-five-year-old German composer Bruno Walter, who
resembled her father more than her brother in his old-world German dignity; indeed, Erika had known him since her childhood as a friend of her father’s and the father of her friend Lotte. This was the first time that she had been properly in love with a man and it was serious, on her side if not on his, although the intensity was tempered when she began a simultaneous affair with the American war correspondent Betty Knox.

As well as seeking a paternal lover, Erika was strengthening her ties with her father. Her years of rebellion were over and she was prepared to be the loyal favourite daughter Thomas Mann needed. Soon after she moved to the US, Erika had stopped mocking the Nazis through cabaret and started criticising them in lectures instead. Her father commended her decision, writing that she was ‘speaking in my stead as my daughter and as my intellectual disciple’. This was an honour that Erika increasingly coveted. After returning home to Los Angeles from Germany in January 1945, she longed to go back to Europe but stayed out of duty to her father whose health was weak and whose seventieth birthday she wished to celebrate with him in June.
³⁵

Partly because of her divided loyalties, Erika was not writing to Klaus as frequently as he would wish. Relations between them became more strained as he took offence at her silence and she bridled at his willingness to find it estranging. ‘You should be aware of the fact that I am physically incapable of resenting anything you do or say,’ Erika told her brother in February, pained that he could deem it possible she would punish him by not writing. Addressing him as ‘little old spouse’, she insisted that if it were not for her loyalty to their father she would return to Europe and to her brother as quickly as possible. ‘Needless to say my heart aches and itches even now, wanting to be where “once mighty” surrenders and “once arrogant” (the German people) remain just as arrogant as ever,’ she told Klaus on VE Day, as he finally made his way to Munich to revisit their former family home.
³⁶

Klaus had persuaded his superiors to send him to Germany to report on conditions in the US zone. Now, as his father’s speech was broadcast across the nation, Klaus wandered through the ruins of the city to the
house in Poschinger Strasse where he, Erika and their siblings had grown up. In a radio broadcast entitled ‘An American Soldier Revisiting his Former Homeland’, Klaus Mann later described the strangeness of walking through once-familiar streets, now reduced to ruin and rubble. Lacking the old landmarks, he found it almost impossible to make his way from the city centre to their house. Munich had been badly bombed in the final year of the war, with three-quarters of the old city centre destroyed. Ninety-two of the city’s cultural and religious buildings had been obliterated by the bombing; a further 182 were damaged, including the cathedral, the old town hall and the National Theatre.
³⁷

The Manns’ house was an empty shell, with the inside burned out, the roof destroyed and the staircase in pieces. But surprisingly there was a girl standing on the balcony in front of Klaus’s bedroom. Taking on the role of conqueror, he asked her in German with an American accent what she was doing. She replied that she had taken refuge there after being bombed out and invited him up using a makeshift ladder. It turned out that during the war the SS had taken over the house and established a
Lebensborn
, a place where ‘racially superior’ young men and women had sex to propagate the German race. ‘They didn’t do it for the fun of it,’ the girl assured Klaus earnestly. ‘Many fine babies were begotten and born in this house . . .’
³⁸

Throughout the war, Klaus Mann had believed that ‘when the Dictator has vanished – and only then, will it again be possible . . . to live in Germany, without fear and without shame’. He was now sad to find that this was not the case. In an article in
Stars and Stripes
he complained that the shock of defeat had failed to enlighten the Germans: ‘the German people show no trace of a sense of responsibility, much less a sense of guilt’. He visited some German artists, his former friend the actor Emil Jannings (who had starred alongside Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg’s immensely popular 1930 film
The Blue Angel
, which was scripted by Carl Zuckmayer from a novel by Heinrich Mann) and the composer Richard Strauss, and came away sure that both were unrepentant Nazis. Strauss complained only about Hitler’s deplorably one-sided musical taste: ‘Hardly ever did he go to hear any of my operas.’
³⁹

Like his father, Klaus was convinced that the war had been conducted by the German people as a whole. And in some moments he too included himself among the guilty. Witnessing his young American lover Thomas Quinn Curtiss (‘Tomski’) departing for training in National Guard Uniform during the war, Klaus had felt that as a German he was responsible for the loss of youthful lives. ‘I don’t want to excuse myself – quite the contrary, I want to stress my own share of guilt and responsibility,’ he wrote in a draft letter to Tomski at the time. Now his disappointment with the German nation came together with his sadness at returning to Germany without his sister. On 16 May 1945 he sent a lengthy report of the trip home to his father, intending it also for Erika. He told his ‘Magician-Dad’ that it would be a grave mistake on his part to return to Germany and play any kind of political role there: ‘Conditions here are too sad. All your efforts to improve them would be hopelessly wasted. In the end you would be blamed for the country’s well-deserved, inevitable misery. More likely than not, you would be assassinated.’ Evidently it would take decades to reconstruct the German cities and the spiritual rehabilitation of the ‘morally mutilated, crippled’ nation would take even longer.
⁴⁰

Two weeks later Thomas Mann gave a speech at the US Library of Congress on ‘Germany and the Germans’. Here he followed his son’s lead in emphasising his new American citizenship, stating that he was addressing his audience as an American and that as an American he was a citizen of the world. He shared the world’s concern about Germany and found that ‘Germany’s horrible fate . . . compels our interest, even if this interest is devoid of sympathy’. At the same time he was more explicit than he had been in his radio broadcast to the Germans in stating that he remained a German in spite of his new passport and that he could not separate himself from the fate of his nation. It would be dishonest to commend himself as ‘the good Germany’ in contrast to the wicked, guilty Germany over there with which he had nothing in common. He had been nurtured in the provincial cosmopolitanism of the old German world; he had felt in himself the potential for religious fanaticism that this entailed.

Here Mann developed the arguments propounded in Klaus and Erika Mann’s
The Other Germany
in seeing Nazism as a peculiarly German psychosis. He even suggested that there was a secret union of the German spirit with the demonic. Both Goethe’s Faust and the Devil who seduced him could be seen as fundamentally German figures; in this reading Goethe, like Mann, was diagnosing the demonic in the German soul. Now Germany had made a Faustian pact with the Devil. The German urge for liberty was always tantamount to inner enslavement because it entailed an attack upon the liberty of others.

In Mann’s somewhat selective narrative, the inwardness of German Romanticism, with its tenderness, passion and reverie, had resulted both in the Pan-Germanism of Bismarck and the death-driven megalomania of Hitler.
⁴¹
Goethe’s Werther, knocking ‘with cold, unflinching hand’ at the ‘brazen portals of Death’, Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, dreaming together of a ‘
sehnend verlangter Liebestod
’ (yearned for, longed for death-in-love) and craving death as an ‘endless realm of ecstatic dreams’, were the antecedants of the warrior heroes called into being by Hitler.
⁴²
So too, the German Romantics had shared Hitler’s vision of a
völkish
German identity grounded in folk blood and soil. As far as Mann was concerned there were not ‘two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning’. Wicked Germany was good Germany in guilt and ruin.
⁴³

Mann was unwittingly echoing the American psychologists at the 1944 conference. In Henry Dicks’s conference report, the delegates viewed Nazism as one expression of ideals that had long prevailed in Germany. But Mann was interested specficially in German artists and the Germany he described was a country whose writers and artists were even more culpable than the rest of its citizens because they had placed themselves and their art above politics and had been encouraged to do so by the rest of the nation, effectively being granted political immunity.