The Bitter Taste of Victory (48 page)

‘The newspapers are full of lies,’ Thomas Mann complained, while he waited anxiously for Erika to come home from hospital after her hysterectomy. ‘Hardly any information about the basic truth is possible. It is clear that the Russians try to force the Allies out of Berlin.’ Meanwhile Mann’s brother Heinrich (currently living along the coast from Mann in Santa Monica) was determined to move to the Soviet zone of Germany and Thomas found himself pleading on behalf of America. Neither side seemed to him any longer to have any moral authority. ‘Agree with Erika: Russia is not ready yet for protectorate of Europe. Nor is America.’
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While Thomas and Erika followed the situation in Germany anxiously in the American newspapers, Klaus Mann was experiencing it on the
ground in Europe. He visited Germany in January, lecturing in universities in the French zone, and then again in the spring, attending
The Devil’s General
in Munich in April and lecturing in Berlin the following month. He was constantly on the move, going from one city to another in the Netherlands and Switzerland; he even went to Czechoslovakia just after the coup, as part of a pre-arranged lecture tour. In Prague he heard the whispered confessions of those who hated the new regime and were anxious to escape to the US.

Klaus remained adrift in the postwar world. He was still attempting, restlessly and increasingly deludedly, to be an American in Germany, but the Americans had lost interest in him now that he did not fit their current agenda. Unlike Carl Zuckmayer, Klaus Mann’s aims did not coincide with those of the American occupiers. It seemed impossible to him for Germany to re-emerge successfully without a long period of repentence and self-doubt; he was horrified by how many of the same people retained influence both culturally and administratively and by the way that proven anti-communism had become far more of a badge of honour than anti-fascism. When in Germany he was now only really welcome in the French zone, where they wanted him to lecture about André Gide and American literature, prepared to see him as an American even if the Americans themselves were not. And it was evident that Klaus like his sister had achieved less than he might have done. It was especially galling to find himself most in demand not as a writer but as a lecturer on other people’s books. Furthermore, the most pressing question for his audiences tended to be the matter of why American writers had not fulfilled their promise. ‘Was it not true that our authors were usually at their best in their early books, only to decline, to peter out later?’ They seemed oblivious that they had a great writer in their midst whose own talents were going rapidly to waste. These days Klaus spent most of his working time translating his recent books and articles from English into German, hoping to find them new chances for publication.
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The previous September, Klaus Mann had published an article asking in German if it was possible to gain a second mother tongue. ‘Can the mother tongue ever be forgotten? Or can we have two languages – two
mothers?’ You could do business in bad English, as a dentist or even a psychoanalyst (a strong Viennese accent only made the analyst’s pronouncements more interesting), but you could not write. Brecht, Feuchtwanger, Thomas Mann and others remained in ‘language exile’ somewhere between Santa Monica and Manhattan, ‘all the time occupied by their German problems and German dreams’. It was possible to change language and write in English; Conrad had done it so they could too; this had been Klaus’s own decision. ‘Will the result of all this be that you become estranged from your mother tongue and never really learn the new one? Such are the fears one sometimes has.’
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It was a fear that plagued him now, as he translated slowly and ponderously, increasingly worried that he could no longer write at all. His diary entries frequently bemoan his loss of fluency in writing; for hours at a time he would rewrite his translation of a few lines. ‘I find it increasingly difficult to work and to live (which means almost a pleonasm as the two terms,
life
and
work
, are practically tantamount to me),’ Klaus wrote to an army friend. ‘There are moments when I feel almost incapable of facing the world mess any longer.’ His response to his own anxiety was to take more and more drugs, alternating heroin, morphine, opium and pethidine. Increasingly he could not work without benzedrine. His pithy diary entries note the drugs injected that day (‘Inj: 4 M’; ‘Inj: 5 Eu (making me rather sick)’) alongside his writing and reading and, more occasionally, sexual encounters (‘X’).
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Thomas Mann may have been thinking of his son when he described morphine in
Faustus
as a peculiarly German source of addiction, suggesting that this ‘exhilarating and pernicious drug’ endowed its users with a collective feeling of ‘freedom, lightness, bodiless well-being’. Klaus felt neither free nor light. On 12 April he gave a lecture in The Hague on ‘Germany and her Neighbours’. His lecture notes were disjointed and disillusioned. ‘If one could only stop thinking about G!’ the notes begin, ‘sadly impossible’. Germany seemed disempowered, but even in its degradation it remained disturbing. It was a vacuum in the heart of Europe and its people were waiting not only for integration and monetary reform but for war (‘with a mixture of hope and horror . . . war would mean the apocalypse but also rehabilitation . . .’).
According to Klaus, the Germans were filled with self-pity instead of regret;
The Devil’s General
was popular only because it showed that you could co-operate with the Nazis and still be good. The US and the Soviet Union were dividing Germany, whose only hope Klaus Mann, like Stephen Spender, located in a federation of Europe. Over the next few years it would become apparent whether mankind could forge peace sensitively or whether irrationality would triumph and a new catastrophe would finish off Germany and her neighbours for good.
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Klaus’s faith both in himself and his demonic homeland was weak. On 18 April he overdosed on thirty Phanodorm (a barbiturate) and then managed to check himself into the Jewish Hospital in Amsterdam for an urgent period of detoxification. Nine days later he was released but he quickly resumed his daily injections of drugs. On 3 May, Klaus flew to Berlin where he gave a radio interview discussing literature and politics and his own relationship with both the US and Germany. He spoke quickly and agitatedly, unable fully to focus on what he was saying.

Mann was in Berlin as the guest of the Americans. His military orders stated that ‘Mr K. M. (American National, Consultant, Temporary Employee, OMGUS) is invited to proceed to Berlin for approximately ten days to give lectures on literature and consult with writers.’ His visit was sociable but he was unable to enjoy himself. Meeting him at parties and lectures, Hilde Spiel found him ‘weary, melancholy, endlessly endearing’. In a report on his trip, Klaus Mann described Berlin sadly as ‘the mangled cadaver of a capital, the most cruelly beaten city, the decisive battlefield of the Cold War, the place where East and West were facing one another in ominous proximity’.
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The battlefield was becoming more tense by the week. On 14 April 1948 a hundred Soviet tanks had arrived in the south sector of Soviet Berlin. ‘It would be playing the Russian game to attach any importance to the arrival,’ one high British spokesman claimed. But the Americans were prepared to play along. The next day twenty-eight American bombers arrived in Germany and were sent on sorties over Berlin. On 16 April the Russians turned away six trucks carrying insulin and penicillin from the US on the only high-speed motor road into the city.
A few days into Klaus’s visit the four deputy commanders of Berlin held a fruitless twelve-hour meeting, arguing for two hours about whether the Soviet deputy commander had charged the US soldiers with having ‘bitten old ladies’ at the previous meeting, or whether he had in fact said ‘beaten’ as he claimed. Klaus was disappointed with both sides but as always he felt more identified with the Americans while in Germany. He was assailed with requests from former acquaintances wanting him to use his waning influence with the occupiers. They appeared on the platform before and after his lectures, inundated him with letters and telephone calls and even knocked on the door of his hotel room. This pageant of spectres from his past only served to remind Klaus how alienated he felt from his former compatriots.
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Europe now seemed to have little to offer Klaus. He decided to visit his parents in California. He missed Erika and he was yearning for a period of comfort and health after the excess and penury of the past few months. Following a brief stopover in New York, where he spent time with Christopher Isherwood and procured more drugs, he arrived in LA on 23 May. Returning to San Remo Drive, Klaus was aware that he was entering a cold house, warmed only by the quiet filial bond of a man and a woman who had renounced passion. He knew that this tie between father and daughter left very little space for him. Erika could never again be his inseparable twin and quasi-lover now that she had shed her rebellious spontaneity to be the peaceful helpmate of her father.

It was obvious soon after he arrived that this was not going to be the reviving trip that Klaus had hoped for and that he could not remain in LA indefinitely. Like Brecht, Klaus found it difficult to feel at home amid the evergreen trees and everblue skies. Isherwood loved California (where he had lived until 1947 and would soon return) because nature here was ‘unfriendly, dangerous and utterly aloof’, which meant that he could not turn her into a stage set for his own private drama. ‘She refuses to become a part of my neurosis.’ This was precisely what made it alienating for Klaus. His neuroses became magnified when they lost their context: when the Germany that he continued to write about obsessively felt like an impossibly other world.
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Around him, his family continued with their routines. Thomas wrote each day and read his work aloud in the evenings; there were occasional guests for lunch and dinner; they listened to music on the radio or gramophone. Erika was still busy with doctors and was helping her father with his correspondence. Katia’s foremost loyalty was to her husband, who for his part had little interest in his writer son. Perhaps he was ashamed of his earlier sexual attraction to him. After he had ignored Klaus as a child, there had been those years when Thomas was secretly ‘enraptured with Eissi’, when he was ‘deeply struck by his radiant adolescent body’ and found it ‘quite natural that I should fall in love with my son’. Then there was the period when Thomas lost interest in both Erika and Klaus, leaving them to their happily symbiotic rebellion. He may have been envious of Klaus’s public homosexuality; he may also have been embarrassed by his earlier adulation. Now it seemed that Thomas’s bond with Erika excluded Klaus, and that if anything Klaus’s status as a fellow writer made closeness more difficult. ‘To be the son of a great man is a high fortune, a considerable advantage,’ Thomas Mann had written in
Lotte in Weimar
. ‘But it is likewise an oppressive burden, a permanent derogation of one’s ego.’
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Thomas’s awareness of this burden may account for how little he mentioned his son’s work. There are significant parallels between Klaus Mann’s 1936
Mephisto
and Thomas Mann’s
Doctor Faustus
that the two writers do not seem to have discussed. Klaus’s depiction of Höfgen as part of a Germany that is driving itself crazily to ruin in
Mephisto
is echoed by
Faustus
with its account of the Dionysian joy of the Weimar republic. Both novels diagnose the seeds of Nazism in Germany’s past and more explicitly both portray Germany as making a Faustian pact with the Devil, yet Thomas Mann seems never to have commented on his son’s novel at any length.
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There are remarkably few mentions of Klaus in Thomas’s diary from this time and those that are there suggest uncomfortable distance: ‘Spoke about Berlin and Germany with Klaus. His tense relation to Erika, rather quaint, like so many things. Spoke warmly about his book, his prose. Eczema on breast disturbing.’ Generally, Thomas was less preoccupied with his son’s return than with the latest news about
Faustus
. The American edition of the novel was now being printed and his publisher Alfred Knopf had just written to congratulate him on ‘another colossal achievement’ that he had read ‘with absolute compulsion’. Feeling estranged from his family, Klaus took on the part of an ungainly teenage son. He was cut off abruptly from the life of cafés and cheap hotels he lived in Europe and New York. Here you had to drive everywhere and he was uneasily dependent on lifts from his mother, sister, and occasionally from Harold – a feckless former sailor whom he had picked up on a previous visit and now saw frequently (meaning at least that ‘Inj’ could occasionally be replaced by ‘X’). Harold survived only on money borrowed from Klaus, who in turn borrowed from his parents. At the beginning of June, Harold was arrested for theft and Klaus had to pay $500 bail. ‘Klaus all over town with his sailor boy who could be a bit more grateful,’ his father observed in his diary.
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