The Bitter Taste of Victory (46 page)

Like Mann in
Faustus
, by dwelling so luxuriantly on these ruins Wilder showed that part of his heart had remained in Germany. The destruction might be necessary but it was devastating none the less. Whether they intended it or not, Wilder and Dietrich had enabled audiences to sympathise with the Germans they despised. When the Americans had sent Wilder into Germany in 1945, they had hoped to teach the Germans tolerance through film. This had proved too complicated, but it had set in motion a process that left Wilder himself learning tolerance through film-making. Through making
A Foreign Affair
and committing to
understanding his characters, he had come to feel more compassionate towards the Germans. Ultimately, Wilder was no more hopeful about the German predicament than Mann. Neither believed that the Americans could have any effect on the over-reaching and demonic German soul; though both hoped to have some impact in Germany through their own ambivalent works of art, neither believed that culture could play much of a role in the Occupation. Yet if the vision of Wilder’s film is tragic, its spirit is resiliently comic. Together Wilder and Dietrich had laid their hatred to rest and found a way to portray a German woman who was both unrepentant and loveable. And they had managed to celebrate the maddening resilience of the Berliners. Amid the unreal evergreen opulence of LA, they had created a film in which Berlin is affectionately portrayed in its ruin, squalor and hedonistic energy.
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It was bizarre recreating the carcass of Berlin in California and then inhabiting it with Germans. But it was less bizarre than it would have been elsewhere in the US, because this was a peculiarly German world. Wilder’s house in Beverly Hills was just a short drive from the house in the coastal Pacific Palisades where Mann had written
Doctor Faustus.
While Dietrich and Arthur squabbled on set, Mann was nursing a cold and reading press-cuttings from Germany, distracted by the unusually oppressive California heat. And they were surrounded by other German exiled artists who had been lured to Hollywood or had found the Californian riviera more enticing than the frantic bustle of New York. The writer Lion Feuchtwanger was around the corner from the Manns; the composer Arthur Schoenberg and philosopher Theodor Adorno were both just a few blocks inland in Brentwood; Bruno Walter was in Beverly Hills, and until recently Bertolt Brecht had been down the coast in Santa Monica, although as long-standing enemies Mann and Brecht did their best to avoid each other except when they found themselves meeting at Feuchtwanger’s house. Mann spent so much time with other German exiles that an hour and a half of English conversation was worth noting in his diary as a tiring act.
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California and Los Angeles in particular polarised Europeans. Arriving in 1941, Brecht had been consistently repelled by the larger-than-life
plants and buildings and the monotonous blue skies. Soon after his arrival he complained that he had been exiled from his own era. He could not breathe in this odourless air; he found himself looking for a little pricetag on every hill or lemon tree. In one poem, he compared Los Angeles to Hell, on the grounds that

In Hell too

There are, I’ve no doubt, these luxuriant gardens

With flowers as big as trees, which of course wither

Unhesitantly if not nourished with very expensive water. And fruit markets

With great heaps of fruit, albeit having

Neither smell nor taste.

For Brecht the vegetation was as unreal as the Hollywood film studios, not least because the city was built on the San Andreas fault, ready to split open at any moment, its life possible only because water had been expensively channeled across the desert from the Rockies. The desert was waiting underneath them, ready to seep through and starve out both plants and people, punishing them for their arrogance.
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But there were Europeans who loved California for just the vastness and opulence that Brecht described; who were pleased to abandon their own grey skies and grubby streets. Simone de Beauvoir had expected to hate Los Angeles when she arrived in 1947, warned off by snobbish Parisian friends. And certainly, she found the traffic terrifying and the downtown area monotonous. But she loved the hills, where the city rose in tiers, and she found it exciting that ‘the most sophisticated city in the world is surrounded by indomitable nature’; that, as Brecht had observed before her, ‘if human pressure were relaxed for even a moment, the wild animals and the giant grasses would soon reclaim possession of their domain’. This strange city did not possess the beauty of New York or the depth of Chicago, but she found it as enjoyable as a kaleidoscope: ‘with a shake of the wrist, the pieces of coloured glass give you the illusion of a new rosette. I surrender to this hall of mirrors.’
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And Thomas Mann, too, had surrendered. He was delighted by the warmth and colour. ‘I was enchanted by the light, by the special fragrance of the air, by the blue of the sky, the sun, the exhilarating ocean breeze,’ he later wrote, describing his move from Princeton to Los Angeles in 1940. He was not especially interested in downtown LA, with its vast modernist municipal buildings and faux Georgian mansions with added Mexican ranchos. But he loved the mountains and the ocean. Shortly after arriving he told a friend in Germany that he now had ‘the light; the dry always refreshing warmth’ he had always wanted: ‘the holm oak, eucalyptus, cedar and palm vegetation; the walks by the ocean which we can reach by car in a few minutes’. Each day Katia drove him to the coast and swam in the ocean while he walked along the promenade. Every couple of days someone stopped to offer him a lift, bemused that this elderly man had chosen to walk rather than drive.
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The following year, the Manns began to build their own house. In 1942 they moved into 1550 San Remo Drive, where they had created a roomier version of their Munich home. Mann loved the view. ‘You ought to see the landscape around our house,’ he told Hermann Hesse, ‘with the view of the ocean, the garden with its trees – palm, olive, pepper, lemon and eucalyptus – the luxuriant flowers, the lawns that are ready for mowing a few days after the seeds were sown. Bright sensory impressions are no small matter in times like these, and the sky is bright here almost throughout the year, sending out an incomparable light which makes everything look beautiful.’ He could see the ocean from his study, which had a view of avocado groves and descending hills, rolling down to the Pacific. And it was the best study he had ever had: a large square room with his familiar desk, lamp and ornaments from Munich and his books lining the walls from floor to ceiling.
¹¹

Here Mann could read German books and think German thoughts while looking out onto a landscape unlike anything he had ever experienced in Europe. This was a completely different model from the American man of letters. The American writer was a hard-drinking fast-living man of action who left a trail of broken-hearted women in
his wake. The German writer sat muffled in his study, nursing his ailments, tended by a retinue of loyal and peaceful followers, renouncing passion in life in order to experience it in his art. But none the less Mann had a voice in US public affairs that few émigrés could boast. He was both a great German artist in America and an American in German California. And this seems to have given him the context he needed to reflect on Germany. Indeed, the new world setting gave him licence to be especially old world. He was sickly and fastidious. He dressed in thick, formal clothes despite the Californian sun; each week he went for a manicure or pedicure and acquired new medicines for his proliferating illnesses.

In December 1947 a young Susan Sontag had visited Mann and been amazed by the old European stage-set she found. The fourteen-year-old Sontag was obsessed by Mann’s novel
The Magic Mountain
(
Der Zauberberg
) and had been lured to San Remo Drive by a friend who thought that as self-consciously precocious young intellectuals they ought to meet Germany’s greatest writer. It was the encounter of ‘an embarrassed, fervid, literature-intoxicated child and a god in exile who lived in a house in Pacific Palisades’. Mann was wearing a bow tie and beige suit, looking just as he appeared in the posed photographs in his books. He sat formally behind his desk and spoke in almost exactly the words of his speeches and articles. Sontag became aware ‘of the intense dedicated quiet of the house’ – a quiet she had never experienced indoors before – and of the slowness and self-consciousness it induced in her own gestures. She felt as though he was not really living in California.
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Mann expected just this slow self-consciousness from his own family, and Katia and Erika were happy to oblige. Katia had long accepted her subservience to her husband. Recalling their daily excursions to the ocean, she later wrote that she never accompanied him on his walks. ‘He liked to walk alone, and I am sure that on these walks he was always already thinking out and arranging in his mind what he was going to write the next day. This was a time when he was completely undisturbed.’

In fact he was undisturbed for much of the day and had been since the Mann children had tiptoed around outside his study in Munich
during his hours of work and rest, all those years ago. Now the middle-aged Erika was tiptoeing around once again, though she herself was becoming as quiet and sickly as her father and was aware of her youth slipping away.
¹³

Everything at the house in San Remo drive was organised to tend to Mann’s genius. He himself had no doubt about his own greatness. Asked in an interview in 1947 to name the three greatest living writers, he did not hesitate to include himself in the list. For him, to admit genius was not so much to show off as to describe a trait with which he had been, usually pleasantly but sometimes inconveniently, bestowed. He had given up a great deal on its account and he expected those around him to do likewise. In
Doctor Faustus
he had asked if genius excuses coldness; if Leverkühn is right to sacrifice warmth for the sake of his art. Mann himself thought that it did but was now saddened by the scale of the sacrifice. He was grateful to seize the tenderness left to him, with Erika and with his grandson Frido.
¹⁴

Erika appreciated her father’s new affectionateness and enjoyed anticipating his needs. After the war ended she had faced a choice: to commit herself to the excitement and chaos of postwar Europe, or to come home and consolidate her bond with her ageing father. She had enjoyed dashing around Germany in her broken car, sometimes accompanied by a feisty female lover, but it had taken its toll on her health. Since returning home in 1946 she had been pleased to remain at her father’s side. ‘My deepest wish is to have Erika live with us as secretary, biographer, literary executor, daughter-adjutant,’ Mann wrote in his diary at the start of February 1948, and Erika’s wishes seemed to coincide with his. Now when Thomas needed to give lectures, Erika corrected his draft English text and coached him in his pronunciation. Afterwards she fielded the questions and usually answered them herself, pretending to translate her father’s answers. She was also seriously considering writing a book about him. And the Americans were driving her further into the family home. She was rarely wanted as a lecturer now that she was seen as too left-wing for the current political climate and she had recently been denied permission to visit Germany.
¹⁵

The health problems that had beset Erika throughout the postwar years came to a head in March 1948. Thomas Mann’s diaries for March contain daily updates about both his own and his daughter’s health, tracking the progress of their colds (he was hoarse with a temperature and earache; Erika was losing her voice once again) and the healing of his broken arm. At the end of the month it became clear that Erika’s problems were more serious. In January a small tumour had been removed from her ovaries. Now, aged forty-two, she would need a full hysterectomy, but she was immediately resistant to the idea. On 30 March, Mann recorded a conversation with his wife about his daughter’s dilemma, unable to understand Erika’s ‘ethical’ objections to this necessary operation. ‘Her suffering gives me heartache,’ he wrote sadly. The next day Erika agreed to the procedure, scheduling it for the following week. Her father was perplexed by her sadness: ‘the desire for a child could at best be possible to fulfill if there was a man around’.
¹⁶

In fact there was a man around. Thomas Mann still did not know about his daughter’s continued liaison with Bruno Walter, who remained a close friend of his and even has a cameo appearance conducting one of Leverkühn’s pieces in
Doctor Faustus.
But at seventy-one Walter was not going to be the father of Erika’s children. In 1945 his wife had died, leaving him free, but in the three years since her death he had continued to insist on secrecy with Erika, making it hard to believe that this was a relationship with a future. He remained the friend of Erika’s father and the father of her friend and it was only a matter of time before Erika was going to be left alone. She would be a woman in her forties, single and living with her ageing parents. Did it matter that she would also soon be incapable of bearing children? She believed that it did, or at least that this operation entailed a process of mourning for the possible futures she must now acknowledge she had lost.