The Bitter Taste of Victory (50 page)

This should have been a way for Klaus to escape his role as the overgrown son in his parents’ house. But he was still dependent on lifts,
though now it was Harold who drove him around in Klaus’s parents’ car, and his life remained strange and unsustainable, especially as Harold picked up boys and stole. Klaus was finishing an article titled ‘Lecturing in Europe’ which he had been writing every day for over a month. Although it was a simple, journalistic account of his postwar travels in Europe, this was one of the most difficult pieces he had ever written, perhaps because it involved coming to terms with his own outsider status in the postwar world. It was in this article that he described the audiences at his lectures in Germany eagerly clamouring for news of American writers and asking why so many had failed to fulfill their early promise. He was now writing the account of his May 1948 visit to Berlin with which it ends, describing the ‘ghost parade’ of former friends beleaguering him on lecture platforms and invading his hotel room. The article concludes on an elegaically personal note:

Like the hero in the last volume of Marcel Proust’s psychological saga
A La Recherche du Temps Perdu
, I had to face my own ‘Past Recaptured’: There it was – smiling at me, beckoning me, ‘Why don’t you stay with us?’ I heard them whisper – yesterday’s playmates, the companions of my early troubles and adventures. ‘We’d love to hear you talk about the literary scene in America – especially if you give us some American Spam and powdered eggs to boot . . .’ Their voices sounded strange, for all the intriguing, dream-like familiarity of their features. I knew that I would not feel at home in their midst any more – and my orders read:
Upon completion, return to proper station.
⁴

Klaus had returned to his proper station, but he did not feel at home in California either. Erika was too busy with their father to pay much attention to him and now his brother Michael had displaced him in his parents’ house. While in Germany, Klaus had acquired a new identity as an American, but writing about Berlin in America, he had to acknowledge his spiritual statelessness. He finished the article on 9 July and sent it to
Town and Country
magazine, noting despondently in his diary that after all that work it would probably be turned down. Two days later he tried to commit suicide. He took sleeping pills, turned on
the gas and then slit his wrists in an overflowing bathtub. Harold rushed him to hospital where he was treated in time.

Klaus’s parents and elder sister were sympathetic but impatient. Thomas did not visit his son in hospital, angry with him for upsetting his mother and helpless in the face of despair that in darker moments he saw as his own bleak legacy to his son. Two of Thomas’s sisters had committed suicide and Thomas observed that ‘the impulse was present in him, and all the circumstances favour it – the one exception being that he has a parental home on which he can rely’. In fact, as Thomas well knew, Klaus was not welcome in the family home at present. And it was Erika who collected her brother from hospital and took him back to stay with her at Bruno Walter’s. She felt responsible for Klaus but she was losing patience too, reporting briskly to a friend in London that her closest brother had ‘tried to do away with himself which was not only a nasty shock but also involved a great deal of time devouring trouble’. There was no motive, she added, just general ‘dégoût and sadness’.
⁵
Klaus saw a psychiatrist who predicted that he would try it again in nine months.

Thomas was right that his son’s impulse to suicide was a sustained desire rather than a moment of aberration. ‘“
La difficulté d’être
” weighs upon me, every hour, every moment,’ Klaus told the Czech writer Otto Eisner in August. ‘I often find it intolerable, almost unbearable. The temptation to rid myself of this enormous burden is always there. In a moment of fatigue and weakness one succumbs to it.’
⁶
Six years earlier, Klaus had described his longing for death more lyrically in his autobiography, seeing it as a peculiarly German obsession and one that his father shared. The Germans, he stated here, are rich in thought and poor in deed; they are the only nation in love with death, combining the noble melancholy of Hamlet with the rebellious insatiability of Faust. This was a view he knew he had inherited from his father, whose marriage he described at the start of the book as an attempt to overcome his natural ‘sympathy with death’, that ‘sweet and deadly temptation . . . the saturnine spell of all romanticism’.
⁷

When Klaus wrote
The Turning Point
in 1942, he was depressed. He had spent the past ten years considering suicide as a serious possibility.
‘In the mornings, nothing but the wish to die,’ he observed in his diary in 1933, saddened by how little he had to lose. Two years later he wrote that only ‘E stands between me and death’. Weighing the advantages and disadvantages of life, he set drugs (‘the tuna [heroin] problem’) against his sister (‘Her work, her success, her moral position. Her love’). As Erika’s love became less certain, he slipped quietly towards death. ‘The craving for drugs is hardly distinguishable from the desire for DEATH,’ he wrote in 1935. Writing about his own death-wish in his autobiography seems to have provided him with the means to stay alive. The romantic rhetoric about the German longing for death enabled him to see his current depression as a form of artistic greatness that allied him with the father he both revered and despised.
⁸

Klaus’s death-wish punctuates
The Turning Point
like a maudlin refrain. His explanations for the temptation to commit suicide often contradicted each other but they were always ennobling. Writing about his lover Ricki, who killed himself in 1932, Klaus stated that ‘many people think life dreary but bearable, whereas a delicate minority is smitten with life but cannot endure it’. This is suicide not as a rejection of life but as an acknowledgement of life’s power. Elsewhere, he suggested that to succumb to death is to succumb to the inevitable rhythms of life itself, with its cycle of growth and decay. ‘The roots of our being are tangled in boggy grounds, soaked with sperm, blood and tears, unending orgy of lechery and decay, sorrowful, lustful.’
⁹

Most revealingly, perhaps, Klaus described his own longing for death as a longing for the lost innocence of childhood. ‘The baby carriage is the paradise lost.’ As a baby, he loved his cradle, which during his childhood he imagined was winged with sails. Over the years he had comforted himself with the image of his cradle as ‘a symbol of night and escape’, but gradually it became longer and tighter. Now, during sleepless nights, he still invoked the image dreamily in his mind, but the vessel on which he embarked to ‘the harbour of forgetfulness’ had taken on a more sinister form and colour. ‘Cradle and coffin, womb and grave are emotional synonyms’; ‘the sleep we keep longing for, the perfect sleep, is dreamless.’
¹⁰

In his late thirties, Klaus was figuring himself as a Peter Pan figure whose longing for perpetual childhood was a longing for death, and whose longing for death was a longing for childhood. He warned his reader to beware of the serpent who brings the apple of knowledge. Growing up yields no happiness: ‘what you forfeit is irreparable and valuable beyond words – your paradise’. This is at once a generalised romantic idealisation of childhood and a more particular analysis of himself as someone ill-equipped for adult life, whose closest companion was the sister who in characterising as a twin he envisaged sharing his paradisal cradle.
¹¹

Ennobling his depression as artistic greatness in his autobiography seems to have been a way for Klaus to keep that depression at bay. It did not last. Shortly after finishing the book in 1942 he had made his first suicide attempt. After that, his time in the army provided him with new purpose but the desire for oblivion lingered, reasserting itself in this more difficult postwar world; a world in which Klaus’s father had publicly repudiated the German longing for death as entwined with Nazism. It is revealing that Klaus’s account of his own death wish in 1948 was less exalting than it had been six years earlier. Although he had spent much of the past year translating his autobiography into German, he does not seem to have recaptured his earlier vantage point. The letter to Eisner talks about fatigue and despair rather than about the unendurable beauty of life.

Erika was right that there was no particular motive for her brother’s suicide attempt, though also disingenuous. She knew full well that for years it had been her role to wrest her brother onto the shores of life. It is ‘only the parts of my life in which she shares that have substance and reality for me’, Klaus wrote in 1948. Without her even the dream of childhood lost its paradisal possibilities. In California, Klaus was childlike but this version of childhood was awkward and unhappy; the apple of knowledge had proved poisonous. None the less Klaus had survived and life had to continue. He spent a few days at Bruno Walters’s house, swimming in the pool and reading Kierkegaard’s
The Sickness unto Death
, before visiting his brother Golo who was holidaying in Palo Alto, and then returning to live in a hotel. His efforts to work
(translating more of
The Turning Point)
were frustrating and he was anxious about Harold, who was now on trial for burglary. Klaus remained sensibly convinced of his lover’s innocence but his life with Harold was becoming more fraught. One night Harold picked up a sailor and Klaus spent several hours wandering the streets while he waited for his lover to have sex in his hotel room. And in the background there was the strange spectacle of the airlift; there was the world driving itself towards its own ruin.
¹²

At the end of June 1948 Bevin had recommended that the US should send heavy bombers to Britain to deter the Russians from interfering with the airlift. On 17 July the first sixty aircraft had arrived. ‘Very tense situation in Berlin,’ Thomas Mann reported in his diary. ‘A few dozen bombers transferred from here to England. War would mean an incalculable revolution, in which all that we would defend, the capitalist monopoly, would surely be destroyed.’ Clay now convinced Truman to provide whatever he needed to sustain the airlift. Talks with the Soviet Union failed when Stalin told western ambassadors in Moscow that he would only lift the blockade if the London Conference decisions (for a unified western zone of occupation) were reversed. There were now flights landing in Berlin every three minutes, totalling 480 flights a day.
¹³

Klaus found the situation unbearably dispiriting. The pan-European world he had hoped would come into being at the end of the war was being blasted out of existence by the idiotic arrogance of two superpowers. The US could no longer be seen as the land of the free and when Klaus received a cable inviting him to come to work with a publisher in Amsterdam, he decided to accept the offer. His departure was scheduled for 14 August. Five days before he left, Erika Mann went to Stockton (a five-hour drive away) to take part in a ‘Town Hall on Air’ discussion about the airlift. The debate was attended by an audience of 4,000 and broadcast on the radio the next day. Thomas, Katia and Klaus listened to the discussion together.

The format of the debate encouraged its speakers to be controversial but Erika went beyond expectations in her forthright condemnation
of both the US and Germany. She began by reminding her audience that there was no written agreement authorising the Americans to pass through the Soviet zone on their way to or from Berlin. The Russians may disdain the truth but they were not in the habit of breaking treaties and it was the Western Allies’ fault that there was no clause in the Potsdam Agreement stipulating right of access. The Russians would not have blockaded Berlin if the Western Allies had retained their right to be there. But ‘the moment we declared our intention to establish an independent western German state with Frankfurt as its capital . . . our presence in Berlin, more than a hundred miles inside the Soviet zone had ceased to make any sense whatever’. Unfortunately the US policy-makers had failed to see this; if they had they might have left immediately with no loss of prestige. Instead, they had waited for the Russians to blockade the city and trapped themselves in the process. Now the talks between the US and the Soviet Union were proving fruitless because the Americans were not prepared to give the Russians anything they wanted: ‘we shall have to pay something – or get out of Berlin’.
¹⁴

This was strong stuff and her interlocuters (who included a wartime naval aide to Eisenhower) wasted no time in decrying her views. Erika insisted that the plan for a West German state was a violation of the Potsdam Agreement and went on to say that there was no need to save the Germans who believed in democracy because hardly any of them did: ‘How can we save Germans who accept democracy when we do not know of any crowd of Germans who are actually doing any such thing? I do not think there should be war over Berlin, because I don’t think Berlin is important to the western allies, and I don’t think there are enough German democrats in Berlin to be worthy to fight over, actually.’