The Bitter Taste of Victory (56 page)

Erika saw her father’s impending trip as a betrayal of Klaus because Germany had been partly responsible for his death. In the manuscript of
The Last Day
which Erika was now reading, Julian says that he wants to die because ‘we killed those Jews – how many of them? Five million, or six? – in the gas chambers . . . It is true, I left Germany long before the Germans committed those ghastly crimes . . . But I used to be one of them. It’s my fault. I can’t bear it.’

Julian has blood on his hands even before he slashes his wrists. Hitler’s Germany had implicated Klaus in a collective guilt that seemed to him to necessitate collective despair. Postwar Germany had rejected him and robbed him of his confidence as a writer, breaking his spirit. Klaus may have been aware that to see his suicide as politically motivated was to sublimate the death instinct, but the ennobling of his death was the last service that Erika could perform for him and she sought refuge in doing it thoroughly.
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Of course Erika herself had played her part in creating Klaus’s feeling of rejection and despair and she regretted it now, though Thomas complained about her ‘bitter distortion of things concerning Klaus but also her own life’. He reminded her of Klaus’s childlike contentment in death, but for her this image was horribly wrenching as well as consoling. Erika had watched over the sleeping body of her younger brother protectively when they were small. The continual mention of Klaus’s childlike grace in death required her to remember the smooth skin and blond curls of the young boy and to superimpose them onto worn, balding middle age. She mourned the child now, as much as the man. Though it helped to know that he had longed all those years to return to his cradle, it was sad that this time it was a cradle she could not share. It is not surprising that her most open account of her grief came in a letter to Pamela Wedekind, their old companion from their early days in Berlin, with whom she had not been in touch for a long time. ‘Despite the years of separation and the sad estrangement, you know and you can measure what this death means for me,’ Erika told her
erstwhile friend and lover in the middle of June. ‘How I am meant to live now I do not know, I only know that I have to.’
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Over the next few weeks Thomas planned his visit to Germany and both Thomas’s and Erika’s physical symptoms proliferated. Erika underwent what Thomas described as ‘a nervous heart attack’ at the end of June and then a period of vomiting and fevers in July. Thomas’s stomach was still bad and he started suffering from a severe nosebleed, which doctors treated with tamponades, injections (to increase blood coagulation) and then a cauterisation of his blood vessel. Katia, too, slipped and injured her knee, but her symptoms were overshadowed by the more dramatic ailments of her husband.
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Thomas had now decided to visit Weimar as well as Frankfurt and Munich although he was aware that a trip to the Eastern zone would alienate the American authorities and make an investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee more likely. He felt horribly torn. On one level the whole German trip had become a betrayal of both Klaus and Erika. Yet returning to Germany also seemed to him the only fitting way to mourn the son whose death he too blamed partly on the demonic homeland they shared. In a July letter to Hermann Hesse, Thomas sadly acknowledged that he had played his part in Klaus’s decline: ‘my relationship to him was difficult, and not without feelings of guilt, for my very existence cast a shadow on him from the start’. He was grief-stricken now but he could not follow Erika in sacrificing everything on the altar of his dead son. He felt that someone in the family needed to keep up ties with the various countries to which they belonged. They could not all follow Klaus into spiritual statelessness and he was not convinced by Erika’s suggestion that they should move to Switzerland.
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Waiting anxiously to depart for Germany on 23 July, Thomas spent his days haemorrhaging and reading hostile reviews of
Faustus
in the German press. After Mann was announced as the recipient of the two Goethe prizes,
Die Zeit
had published an article condemning his novel as a ‘psychoanalytical study that is seasoned with political and personal resentment’ by a man who had failed to grasp the essence of music, which immediately sparked another charged debate about its author.
Finally, the day for departure arrived and Thomas and Katia said goodbye to Erika, who was returning to Amsterdam. In his 1945 letter to von Molo, Thomas Mann had described his dream of one day feeling the soil of his old home under his feet, prepared for all his years of love to overcome any feelings of estrangement. Now the day for his return had come and, with blood still pouring from his nose and his enemies bracing themselves for public combat, it felt as though he were going to war.
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Mann arrived in Frankfurt on 24 July 1949 on a train from Basel. After four years, he finally confronted the burned-out houses and flattened streets that had now become familiar from literature, photographs and films. The rubble might be piled up neatly, efficiently bricked in by temporary walls, but Frankfurt remained eviscerated by the destruction that Mann had said would ‘scream to the heavens were not we who suffer it ourselves laden with guilt’. Laid out before him in one German city after another were the ruins of all that he had believed in, spiritually and artistically; it was a fitting setting for mourning both the lost world of his youth and the son he had loved.
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Germany was now firmly divided and it was evident that it would only be a matter of weeks before the two states were legally formed. In June the Council of Foreign Ministers had met once more in Paris and had failed to find a solution to the question of Berlin because the Western Allies could not accept the Soviet request for a veto. At the same time, the Parliamentary Council was putting into place procedures for an election in West Germany and SED (Communist Party) leaders in East Germany were electing a new Volksrat (People’s Council), which would form the basis of a new government in the East. Wilhelm Pieck (co-chairman of the SED alongside Otto Grotewohl), asked Stalin for help forming ‘a German government . . . as quickly as possible’. In response to the failure of the Paris meeting, the Russians instituted new ground blockades into Berlin on 11 July.
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For many of the people involved in setting up the new German states, this was a hopeful moment. For Mann it was a sign that his ideal
of a
Kulturnation,
rising phoenix-like from the ashes, had failed. None the less his response to the impending division of the country was to claim that he spoke for the transcendent power of German language and literature. In his acceptance speech for the Goethe prize in Frankfurt’s St Paul’s church, he announced that he recognised no zones: ‘My visit is to Germany itself, Germany as a whole, and to no occupied zone. Who should vouch for and proclaim the unity of Germany if not an independent writer whose true cultural home, as I have said, is free language, untouched by occupations?’

Describing his German exile – those ‘months of wandering from country to country’ – he proclaimed that his loyalty to the German language had remained. This was the ‘true home that cannot be lost’ from which no potentate could evict him. Now he came to them as ‘a poor, suffering man’ trying to handle the labour pains of this new time. He advised them to look, as he did, to Goethe, as ‘a poet and wise man, friend of life, hero of peace’ who combined the demonic with the godly and who was an exemplar of humankind.
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Certainly, if any figure was able to cross zones, it was Goethe, as was demonstrated by the enthusiasm with which both incipient states celebrated his bicentenary that summer. In the spring Grotewohl had informed a German youth group that Goethe was the ‘symbol of our unified national culture’ and their hope for ‘the highest expression of modern national self-awareness’. Since the end of the war, Germans across the political spectrum had been lauding Goethe as the peace-loving transnational writer best placed to show Germany the path back to righteousness. In his 1945 letter to Mann, Thiess had assured Mann that now the seducer had been destroyed, the Germans had no other
Führer
than Goethe, ‘that star of German authority in the world which now shines brighter than ever’. A year later the historian Friedrich Meinecke had published a book suggesting that the Germans’ best hope for salvation was to found ‘Goethe communities’, which would meet on a weekly basis and establish ‘something indestructible – a German
character indelebilis
’ in the midst of their ruined fatherland. Indeed, the cult of Goethe reached such an extreme that when Karl Jaspers was awarded the Frankfurt Goethe prize in 1947 he felt obliged
to warn his audience that their Goethe worship had become so slavish it was depriving Germans of their intellectual independence (‘Goethe’s world is past . . . it is not our world’), prompting the ire of Ernst Robert Curtius among others.
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Mann was right, then, that his enthusiasm for Goethe would reach receptive ears in East and West. It was promising for cultural unity that both Frankfurt and Weimar (the cities where Goethe was born and died) had decided to honour Mann himself with their Goethe prize. And if anyone could claim authority to speak for Goethe, then perhaps it was Mann: Mann whose
Doctor Faustus
was grudgingly recognised even by his enemies as the first great German postwar novel; Mann who remained one of the few major German writers whose major works spanned the whole forty-nine years of his troubled century and who had published in the same century as Goethe.

None the less, it seemed too easy for Mann to come in from outside and claim that the zonal boundaries should be seen as irrelevant. This was a luxury only possible if you had made your home in California, as journalists were quick to point out over the next few days. They could not know that he had to say this; that he knew as well as they did that the Cold War made a single unified
Kulturnation
impossible, but that he had to attempt to call it into existence if only as a way of marking its loss. This was all that was left to him in a world that seemed to have far less need of him than it had done during those wartime years when he was urgently required to represent German culture in exile. And it was a way of pledging his loyalty to his dead son and his absent daughter, fighting for their vision of Germany even if it could have no place in the new political scene. ‘We
know
that it exists,’ Klaus and Erika had insisted in 1940, ‘this “other Germany”; and it is our devout wish that it will soon make itself felt.’ Then they had called to their ‘American friends’ to help Germany and Europe to find ‘the road to peace and creative collaboration’; to allow the
Kulturnation
to reassert itself and guide Europe towards peace. Mann could do nothing but add his hopes to theirs.
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From Frankfurt, Mann travelled in a chauffeured Buick to Stuttgart and then on to Munich on 28 July. He decided not to visit his house,
but it was impossible to avoid either memories or ruins. ‘The city, a past in tatters, little heart for it,’ he wrote in his diary. Later he told a friend that the sight of the wreckage had proved too much for him: ‘To see this whole portion of an outlived past reappearing in a tattered and battered state, with the faces of people so much aged, has something ghostly about it, and I did a great deal of looking the other way.’ In this letter Mann claimed that he was too unfeeling to care about the past. He did not want to dwell sentimentally on lost times and preferred to live freshly in new things. In fact he had dwelt on just these ruins in
Doctor Faustus
, lovingly and sadly. It was not lack of feeling but fear of feeling too much that made him refuse to visit the house in which he had fallen in love with the tousled hair and lean body of the son who had just died.
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Mann concentrated on seeing the official sights, guided by bureaucrats and accompanied always by police escorts. Taken to Munich’s more affluent districts as a guest of honour, he was struck by the prosperous life now possible amid the debris. The currency reform had paid off and there were plentiful goods available in the shops, even if the majority of Germans could still not afford them. Indeed, during her visit earlier in the summer Rebecca West had been repulsed by the extravagant cream cakes indulged in throughout West Germany, given that such luxury was not available in England. Later Mann would remark that ‘the sight of a menu card in even one of the more modest Munich restaurants must surely arouse curious feelings in an Englishman’.
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