Thomas Mann (original) (raw)

Sections

Thomas Mann - Buddenbrooks
Marriage and Family Life
Death in Venice
First World War
The Weimar Republic
The Magic Mountain
Nazi Germany
Thomas Mann in Non-Political Exile
Thomas Mann - Anti-Fascist
Un-American Activities Committee
Thomas Mann: 1950-1955
Primary Sources
Student Activities
References

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann, the son of Thomas Johann Mann and Júlia da Silva Bruhns, was born in Lübeck, Germany, on 6th June, 1875. He later wrote that his "childhood was sheltered and happy". (1)

Mann's father was an energetic and successful businessman. In 1863, at the age of 23, had inherited the ownership of the Johann Siegmund Mann firm, a granary and shipping business dating back to the previous century. (2) His brother, Heinrich Mann, remembered his father as "young, gay, and carefree." (3)

Thomas Mann later recalled his father's "dignity and good sense, his ambition and industry, his personal and intellectual distinction, his social talents and his humor... he was not robust, rather nervous and susceptible to suffering; but he was a man dedicated to self-control". (4)

Júlia Mann had been born in South America and was the daughter of a German planter who had married a Creole woman of Portuguese and Indian ancestry. (5) She was considered to be Lübeck's most beautiful woman and was described as "a much admired beauty and extraordinarily musical". (6) Thomas claimed that "with the ivory complexion of the South, a nobly sculpted nose, and the most attractive mouth I ever encountered". (7)

Thomas Mann attended Dr. Bussenius's private elementary school from 1882 to 1889. He then progressed to the Lübeck Gymnasium. Mann later recalled that he "loathed school". Thomas spent his time reading, writing or dreaming. However, he found school much more difficult than his brother, Heinrich, who received consistently good grades but upset his father by refusing to go to university. (8)

Although less talented than his brother, Thomas received praise from his father: "My second son (Thomas) is responsive to calm admonishments; he has a good disposition and will find his way to a practical vocation. I feel justified in expecting that he will be a support to his mother." (9)

Heinrich Mann refused to join the family business and in October 1889, he was employed by the Dresden book shop of Jaensch & Zahn as an apprentice. Thomas Johann Mann was deeply upset by this rejection and when he died in June 1891 he left instructions for the family granary and shipping business to be liquidated. (10)

Thomas Mann - Buddenbrooks

After the death of his father, Mann and his mother moved to Munich, where he started work with an insurance firm. He decided on a literary career and contributed to Simplicissimus, the well-known satirical weekly. (11) Started in 1896 by Albert Langen, it employed the cartoonist, Thomas Heine and several talented writers such as Frank Wedekind and Rainer Maria Rilke.

A supporter of liberal causes, Simplicissimus appeared revolutionary when compared to established journals such as Kladderadatsch. It especially upset the German government by objecting to a law in 1897 that penalized striking workers. It also supported trade unionists in their struggle with employers during this period. In 1898, after objections by Wilhelm II, both Heine (six months) and Wedekind (seven months) were imprisoned for their attack on the German monarchy. (12)

Heinrich Mann was also keen to become a writer. Both men greatly admired the work of Heinrich Heine: "In his enthusiasm for Heine, in trying his hand at verse, fiction, and criticism, Thomas at this time was faithfully following in the footsteps of his elder brother. His youthful revolt against society, natural though it was for his age, seems also to have been borrowed from his brother, who was bohemian by instinct". (13) Heinrich had several novels published but it was not until the appearance of In the Land of Cockaigne (1900), a portrayal of the decadence of high society, that he received any recognition as a writer.

Thomas Mann had been working on a novel, a fictional account of the Mann family, for several years. He decided to start the story in 1835 when the Johann Siegmund Mann company was established and to record the growth and decline over four decades. (14) He researched the book by interviewing elderly relatives. Wilhelm Marty, his father's cousin, later recalled that he had asked about "business cycles and the rise and fall of grain prices, about the possible reasons for the decline of a grain firm, and even about the kind of street lighting Lübeck had" before he had been born. (15)

On the verge of submitting his manuscript, he experienced a loss of confidence. "Whole chapters at the beginning, which now strike me as repulsively stupid, will have to be reworked". The novel was finished in June 1900. He wrote to his friend, Paul Ehrenberg: "I shall probably have to throw it into my publisher's maw for a song. Money and mass applause are not to be won with such books." (16)

Thomas Mann sent his manuscript to Samuel Fischer, a publisher in Berlin. Fischer wanted to publish the book but wanted it reduced by at least 50%. Mann refused, but told him that if he published the book as it, he can dictate your terms. Fischer agreed to publish it uncut in two volumes, but with no advance payment. (17) Thomas was not convinced the book was going to be a success and he wrote to his brother, Heinrich, complaining "you are flourishing while at the moment I am going to pieces". (18)

Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901) received a good review from Rainer Maria Rilke, who praised the novel's "realistic detail". But others claimed that the book lacked structure or was insufficiently dramatized. The novel sold slowly in the first nine months but sales picked up after it was written about by the well-known critic, Samuel Lublinski in the Berliner Tageblatt. He considered it an outstanding achievement that would become a classic and "read by many generations". (19)

Rochus Misch

Thomas Mann in 1905

The book sold over a million copies over the next couple of years. (20) The book was often compared to his brother's first big-seller, In the Land of Cockaigne: "Compared to the Tolstoyan achievement of Buddenbrooks, Heinrich's novel may seem comparatively light, but contemporaries like Rilke felt it had ushered both expressionism and social criticism into the German novel. For his admirers Heinrich's early work, more topical, vivacious, and unfinished than his brother's - as the journalistic rate of production might guarantee - provides a more useful guide to the era as well as prophetic views of Germany's future. (These readers would contend that Buddenbrooks points backward.)" (21)

Marriage and Family Life

In January 1905, Thomas Mann decided to marry Katia Pringsheim Mann, the daughter of a wealthy, Jewish industrialist family who owned coal mines and early railroads. Thomas wrote to Heinrich about his decision: "A feeling of the lack of freedom that I cannot rid myself of up to now, and of course you call me a timid plebeian. But it's easy for you to talk. You are absolute. I, on the other hand, have paused to improve my state of mind." (22)

Rochus Misch

Katia Mann

Heinrich Mann did not attend his brother's wedding. His mother, who also did not approve of the marriage, wrote, "Please, please, dear Heinrich, follow my advice and do not withdraw from Tommy... You are both men blessed by God, dear Heinrich - don't let your personal relationship with Tommy become strained.... Your latest works were not without exception liked. That has nothing to do with your sibling relationship." (23)

Erika Mann as born in Munich on 9th November, 1905. Soon after Erika was born, her father wrote to his brother, Heinrich Mann about his new child: "Unexpectedly, the birth was frightfully difficult, and my poor Katia had to suffer so cruelly that the whole thing became an almost unendurable horror. I shall not forget this day for the rest of my days. I had a notion of life and one of death, but I did not yet know what birth is. Now I know that it is as profound a matter as the other two.... The little girl, who will be named Erika at her mother's wish, promises to be very pretty. For brief moments I think I see just a little Jewishness showing through, and every time that happens it greatly amuses me." (24)

It is claimed that the parents were disappointed that their first child was a girl. The next year a son, Klaus Mann, was born, therefore guaranteeing the Mann dynastic name. Erika and Klaus looked so much alike and were so emotionally close, they were known as "the twins". They both dressed similarly and celebrated their birthdays on the same date." (25)

Although her mother came from a Jewish family, both children were baptised as Protestants. According to Mann's biographer, Anthony Heilbut, Erika was his favourite. The Mann were considered to be very unconventional: "Mann had tainted his new family with scandal. It would trail him for years; literary gossip recounted how Katia strolled hand-in-hand with her brother Klaus; while the Mann's oldest children, Erika and Klaus, had a penchant for shared wardrobes." (26)

According to Colm Tóibín, Thomas Mann made clear his own sexual interest in Klaus (nicknamed Eissi). Later, when Klaus was 14, he wrote in his diary: "Am enraptured with Eissi... terribly handsome in his swimming trunks. Find it quite natural that I should fall in love with my son... It seems I am once and for all done with women?... Eissi was lying tanned and shirtless on his bed, reading; I was disconcerted." Later that year he wrote, "came upon Eissi totally nude" and was "deeply struck by his radiant adolescent body; overwhelming". (27)

Death in Venice

In the early summer of 1911 Thomas and Katia Mann visited Italy. On the steamer to Venice, Thomas observed "an old fellow dressed in oversmart clothing, his face touched up with rouge, his goatee and mustache with dye." On the arrival at the Hotel des Bains he saw "a boy of about thirteen, dressed in a sailor suit and of unusual beauty". His name was Wladyslaw Moes and he was actually ten years old at the time. Mann heard rumours that there was cholera in the city. British travel agent advises him to leave straight away. He agrees that this is the safest option and booked tickets to take him back to Pola. (28)

Kania Mann later recalled: "In the dining-room, on the very first day, we saw the Polish family, which looked exactly the way my husband described them: the girls were dressed rather stiffly and severely, and the very charming, beautiful boy of about 13 was wearing a sailor suit with an open collar and very pretty lacings. He caught my husband's attention immediately. This boy was tremendously attractive, and my husband was always watching him with his companions on the beach. He didn't pursue him through all of Venice - that he didn't do but the boy did fascinate him, and he thought of him often." (29) Wladyslaw Moes confirmed that he was aware that while at the hotel he was conscious of an "old man" watching them attentively. (30)

Rochus Misch

Wladyslaw Moes (middle-left) and his friend, Janek Fudowski (top) and his three sisters (1911)

On his return to Germany he read about the death of his friend, Gustav Mahler. He then began a new novel about Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author in his early fifties who has recently been knighted in honor of his artistic achievements. Mann borrowed Mahler's physical features and name for his main character. However, most critics believe the man is actually based on himself. "He lent to Aschenbach many of his intimate personal habits: the three morning hours devoted to writing, the essential midday nap, the indispensable teatime, the afternoon walk that would refresh him for his evening bout of letter writing... He also allotted to Aschenbach his special tenderness for prepubescent boys." (31)

Mann wrote to his friend, Philip Witkop, that during his holiday he had been working on a new novel "serious and pure in tone, concerning a case of pederasty in an aging artist. You will say: hum, hum, but it is very decent". (32) Richard Winston, who has studied Mann's diaries, and believes the story had been developing for some time as "he had long been intrigued by the concept of an older man who has given himself single mindedly to high achievements, only to be seized late in life by love of an inappropriate object who will prove his downfall." (33)

The boy in Death in Venice, Tadzio, is the boy in the sailor suit he saw in the Hotel des Bains. Mann later acknowledged: "Nothing is invented in Death in Venice.... The dreary Pola boat, the grey-haired rake, the sinister gondolier, Tadzio and his family, the journey interrupted by a mistake about the luggage, the cholera, the upright clerk at the travel bureau, the rascally ballad singer, all that and anything else you like, they were all there. I had only to arrange them when they showed at once and in the oddest way their capacity as elements of composition." (34)

The critic, Erich Heller, has successfully summarized the story in the following way: "The writer Gustave von Aschenbach tired by years of uninterrupted work, decides to travel. His journey leads him to Venice. Guests at the same Lido hotel are a Polish family. The youngest child, a boy of about fourteen called Tadzio, strikes Aschenbach as possessing perfect beauty. His admiration gradually grows into passion. As he keeps the secret of his love, so Venice seeks to guard its own: a spreading epidemic of Asiatic cholera. Yet Aschenbach discovers it. Instead of warning the Polish family and departing himself, he yields to the hypnosis of his passion. Staying on, he joins with his own the sinister secret of Venice. With his moral will broken and his soul deranged, he dies on the beach in the sight of Tadzio, who stands Hermes-like on the fringe of the sea, silhouetted against the blue horizon." (35)

The humid weather begins to affect Aschenbach's health, and he decides to leave Venice. On the morning of his planned departure, he sees Tadzio again, and decides to stay. Over the next days and weeks, Aschenbach's interest in the beautiful boy develops into an obsession. He watches him constantly and secretly follows him around the city. A British travel agent warns him that the authorities had suppressed news of a serious cholera epidemic in Venice. Aschenbach considers warning Tadzio's mother of the danger, but eventually decides against this, knowing that if he does, the family will leave the hotel and he will never see the boy again.

Wladyslaw Moes

Wladyslaw Moes as a child

Aschenbach strong feelings for the young boy, makes him aware of his aging body. In an attempt to look more attractive, he visits the hotel's barber shop and his face painted to look more youthful. A few days later he discovers the family plan to leave after lunch. He goes down to the beach to his usual deck chair. He sits watching Tadzio, who is looking out to sea. He then turns around and looks at Aschenbach. He thinks he is suggesting he joins him. He tries to rise and follow, only to collapse into his chair where he dies, a victim of cholera.

Death in Venice was initially serialised in a magazine in October and November 1912 and published as a book in February 1913. It received great reviews and was clearly Mann's greatest success since Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family. Over the next few years it would be published in twenty countries, in thirty-seven editions. Anthony Heilbut has argued: "The history of its reception comprises an astonishing chapter of sexual politics... Thus the fact that Mann, a treatise whose subject is a matter of indifference." (36)

Stefan Kanfer has pointed out. "In the novella, the aging Author-Philosopher Gustave Aschenbach seeks renewal in Venice. But like the fugitive with an appointment in Samarra, he finds death awaiting him. An elusive and beautiful youth, Tadzio, attracts the writer. Though he never touches his beloved, never even speaks to him. Aschenbach is rendered immobile by his platonic affair. A plague of cholera racks the city. At any time the writer is free to leave, but he cannot. Eventually, rouged and dyed in imitation of youth, Aschenbach assumes the aspect of a broken clown." Kanfer goes on to argue: "Mann's Death in Venice is, in fact, no more about homosexuality than Kafka's The Metamorphosis is about entomology." (37)

First World War

The German government declared war on France on 3rd August, 1914. The following day Herbert Asquith, the British prime-minister announced it was at war with Germany. Thomas Mann, like most Germans, joined in the general enthusiasm for the First World War. His brother, Heinrich Mann, disagreed with this position and told him so in a letter written in September, 1914. Thomas replied: "Can you really believe that Germany would be so set back in its culture or its civilized behaviour by this great, basically respectable, indeed solemn popular war." (38)

Although nearly 40 he volunteered for the Landsturm, the reserve army. "The physician who examined him happened to know his work and reached the sensible conclusion that the writer Thomas Mann would make a greater contribution to the war effort than the soldier. Mann's despair was within manageable limits; he wrote to a friend that his nerves were bad and his heart, head and stomach would fail him. The doctor had probably saved him from disgrace." (39)

Thomas Mann did his patriotic duty as a moral apologist for the war in a number of writings beginning with an essay, Thoughts in Wartime, written in October 1914, where he made it completely clear that he fully supported the aims and objectives of Kaiser Wilhelm II. This received considerable praise from those who had joined the German Army. One soldier wrote: "Day before yesterday I read in the trench your thoughts about the war. I must say that each word spoke to me from the heart." (40)

Walter Laqueur argues that "By 1916 Thomas Mann understood that the war could no longer be won, and by 1917 he realized that its continuation was bound to cause radical revolutions. But he could not bring himself to admit that he had been wrong: He simply became more pessimistic." (41) Heinrich Mann constantly attacked his brother for his position on the war and accused him of lacking empathy for the men who were fighting and suffering in the war. "The inability to take an unfamiliar life seriously produces monsters... The world in shambles and 10 million corpses under the earth. That certainly is a vindication! That promises gratification for the ideologue. But I'm not the man to tailor misery and the death of peoples to the favourite divisions of my mind... The hour is coming, I certainly hope, in which you will see people, not shadows, and then also me." (42)

During this period, Thomas Mann, was writing Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), however, it did not reach bookshops until one month before the armistice. In the book he claims that Germany had been driven into the war by its "envious adversaries". However, it was necessary, "for the pre-war world had been deeply corrupt, not worth preserving". War was a tremendous creative event as "it brought about national unity". Mann went on to attack "France which had a democratic civilization but no culture; against the British who wanted to re-educate Germany using Gurkhas and Hottentots who had been fighting for them". (43)

The Weimar Republic

Thomas Mann held very conservative political views, whereas his brother, Heinrich Mann, became increasingly interested in left-wing politics. He was a supporter of Kurt Eisner, the Jewish leader of the Independent Socialist Party in Munich. This was a departure from his earlier anti-Semitism. Konrad Heiden has pointed out: "On November 6, 1918, he (Kurt Eisner) was virtually unknown, with no more than a few hundred supporters, more a literary than a political figure. He was a small man with a wild grey beard, a pince-nez, and an immense black hat. On November 7 he marched through the city of Munich with his few hundred men, occupied parliament and proclaimed the republic. As though by enchantment, the King, the princes, the generals, and Ministers scattered to all the winds." (44)

The following day Eisner led a large crowd into the local parliament building, where he made a speech where he declared Bavaria a Socialist Republic. Eisner made it clear that this revolution was different from the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and announced that all private property would be protected by the new government. Eisner explained that his program would be based on democracy, pacifism and anti-militarism. The King of Bavaria, Ludwig III, decided to abdicate and Bavaria was declared a republic.

On 9th November, 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II also abdicated and the Chancellor, Max von Baden, handed power over to Friedrich Ebert, the leader of the German Social Democrat Party. At a public meeting, one of Ebert's most loyal supporters, Philipp Scheidemann, finished his speech with the words: "Long live the German Republic!" He was immediately attacked by Ebert, who was still a strong believer in the monarchy and was keen for one of the his grandsons to replace Wilhelm. (45)

On 21st February, 1919, Eisner was assassinated by Anton Graf von Arco auf Valley. It is claimed that before he killed the leader of the Independent Socialist Party he said: "Eisner is a Bolshevist, a Jew; he isn't German, he doesn't feel German, he subverts all patriotic thoughts and feelings. He is a traitor to this land." (46)

Heinrich Mann spoke at Eisner's funeral and at his memorial three weeks later. Thomas Mann, who was deeply opposed to socialism, commented that Heinrich claimed that "Eisner had been the first intellectual at the head of a German state... in a hundred days he had had more creative ideas than others in fifty years, and... had fallen as a martyr to truth. Nauseating!" (47) However, Thomas was one of the few leading Germans to support the Weimar Republic, even though he was not passionate about it. (48)

The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann started writing what was to become The Magic Mountain in July 1912. However, the writing of the book was halted by the First World War when he used his skills as a writer to produce war propaganda. He did not return to the novel until April 1919.

The central protagonist of the story, Hans Castorp, is the only child of a Hamburg merchant family who, following the early death of his parents, has been brought up by his grandfather and by an uncle named James Tienappel. In 1907 Castorp decides to take a recuperative vacation before beginning his engineering studies. He therefore decides to visit his tubercular cousin Joachim Ziemssen in a mountaintop sanatorium in Davos for a three-week visit.

Castorp contracts a mild fever on arrival and, with the collusion of doctors who are perhaps as interested in financial rewards as they are in the health of their patients, "comes to the conclusion that a life revolving chiefly around extravagant meals, daily rest cures, love affairs, walks in the woods, philosophical discussion, and plenty of free time to learn about botany, opera, and the occult suits him better than office work." (49)

The world of the sanatorium catches him in its spell. He falls in love with Clawdia Chauchat, has long conversations with Lodovico Settembrini and Leo Naphta and deeply admires Mynheer Peeperkorn. What was intended as a stay of a few weeks stretches into months, and then years, "Castorp... himself is diagnosed tubercular and dutifully takes his place among the cast of coughing consumptives. There is a chilling ambiguity as to just how much of Hans's illness is genuine and how much the result of going native". The novel ends with Castorp leaving sanatorium on the outbreak of the war in 1914. (50)

The Magic Mountain was an instant success. Within two months of its publication in November 1924, it sold 50,000 copies. He told his friend, Ernst Bertram, "I must tell you entre nous that I have earned seventy thousand marks by selling tickets to my mystical-comical aquarium." (51)

On 12th November, 1929, Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature and an award of 200,000 marks. Martin Fredrik Böök, professor of literature at Lund University, and a key figure on awarding the prize, stated that The Magic Mountain was a monstrosity and that Mann had "received the prize exclusively, or at any rate chiefly", for his earlier novel, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family. (52)

Thomas and Katia Mann now lived in luxury. Their son, Gottfried Mann later wrote, "thanks to the Nobel Prize and the tremendous earnings of The Magic Mountain. They took trips, they ate and drank well, and two large cars stood in the garage: an open American car and a German limousine. When they went to the theatre, the chauffeur waited in the lobby with their fur coats at the end of the performance. This style of life, which they went to no trouble to conceal, made their growing number of political enemies hate them all the more". (53)

Nazi Germany

Thomas Mann held conservative political views. Unlike his brother, Heinrich Mann, who was a socialist, he refused to criticise Adolf Hitler. His biographer, Hermann Kurzke, has argued that during the period before he took power, Mann developed friendships with some significant figures in the Nazi Party: "Does that make Thomas Mann a precursor of Fascism? He certainly made an effort to stay out of the way of the resurgent right-wing movement of the time. Very early on in the summer of 1921, he took note of the rising Nazi movement and dismissed it as ‘swastika nonsense’. As early as 1925 when Hitler was still imprisoned in Landsberg, he rejected the cultural barbarity of German Fascism with an extensive, decisive and clearly visible gesture." (54) However, others had pointed out, while he was critical of Hitler in his diary, he was always careful not to attack Hitler in print. (55)

Mann's eldest daughter, Erika Mann, held left-wing views and divorced her husband, Gustaf Gründgens, when he became sympathetic to fascism. Erika, like her father, was bi-sexual. She began a passionate affair with Pamela Wedekind, who at that time was engaged to her brother, Klaus Mann. Erika also had a relationship with the actress Therese Giehse, and appeared in the film about lesbianism Mädchen in Uniform (1931). It was a great success in Germany but because of its subject matter it was banned in the United States. (56)

Colm Tóibín has pointed out that during this period Erika and Klaus "wrote articles and books and made outrageous statements; they travelled, they had many lovers. Erika worked in the theatre and appeared in films, Klaus wrote more plays. In other words, they took full advantage of the freedoms offered by the Weimar Republic. For many in the Nazi Party, they were the epitome of all that was wrong with Germany. And their mother’s Jewish background didn’t endear them to the National Socialists either." (57)

In June 1932 Heinrich Mann joined with Albert Einstein, Ernst Toller, Arnold Zweig, Käthe Kollwitz, Karl Kollwitz, Willi Eichler, Arthur Kronfeld, Kurt Grossmann, Karl Emonts, Anton Erkelenz, Hellmuth Falkenfeld, Walter Hammer, Theodor Hartwig, Maria Hodann, Minna Specht, Hanns-Erich Kaminski, Erich Kaestner, Theodor Plievier, August Siemsen, Helene Stocker, Pietro Nenni, Erich Zeigner, Paul Oestreich and Franz Oppenheimer to sign an appeal by the International Socialist Combat League (ISK) for tactical cooperation of German Communist Party (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the Reichstag elections of July 1932. However, Thomas Mann refused to sign the appeal.

David Low, The Salute with both hands now (3rd July, 1934)

Erika Mann and Klaus Mann

In January 1932, Erika Mann was asked to read a poem by Victor Hugo to a women’s pacifist group. However, a group of Sturmabteilung (SA) men were in the audience and they heckled her. One of them shouted out: "You are a criminal... Jewish traitoress! International agitator!" She later wrote: "In the hall, everything became a mad scramble. The Stormtroopers attacked the audience with their chairs, shouting themselves into paroxysms of anger and fury." The Nazi newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, reported that Mann was "a flatfooted peace hyena" with "no human physiognomy". Mann sued for damages and after examining several photographs of her the judge declared that her face was in fact legally human." (58)

Mann now became heavily involved in politics. "I realised that my experience had nothing to do with politics - it was more than politics. It touched at the very foundation of my - of our - of the existence of all." Mann joined together with a group of left-wing activists, including Klaus Mann, Therese Giehse, Walter Mehring, Magnus Henning, Wolfgang Koeppen and Lotte Goslar, to establish a cabaret in Munich called Die Pfeffermühle (The Peppermill). (59)

The production opened on 1st January, 1933. Erika Mann wrote most of the material, much of which was anti-Fascist. It ran for two months next door to the local Nazi headquarters, and, since it was so successful, was preparing to move to a larger theatre when the Reichstag went up in flames. Erika and Klaus were on a skiing holiday while the new theatre was being decorated and arrived back in Munich to be warned by the family chauffeur, that they were in danger. Later, Klaus wrote that the chauffeur "had been a Nazi spy throughout the four or five years he lived with us... But this time he had failed in his duty, out of sympathy, I suppose. For he knew what would happen to us if he informed his Nazi employers of our arrival in town." (60)

Rochus Misch

Heinrich Mann

Adolf Hitler gained power in January 1933. Soon afterwards, a large number of writers were declared to be "degenerate authors" because they were Jews or held left-wing views. This included Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Hans Eisler, Ernst Toller, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, H.G. Wells, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Erich Maria Remarque, Karl Kautsky, Thomas Heine, Arnold Zweig, Ludwig Renn, Jack London, Rainer Maria Rilke, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Theodor Plievier, Magnus Hirschfeld, Max Brod, Richard Katz, Franz Werfel, Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwangerand Hermann Hesse. On 10th May, the Nazi Party arranged the burning of thousands of "degenerate literary works" were burnt in German cities. (61)

However, Thomas Mann's work still remained popular in Germany and unlike his brother, Heinrich, had made no statements attacking the regime. Erika Mann decided that in time his life might be in danger. She contacted her parents and warned them not to return to Munich. Mann, who was on holiday at the time, was warned that he faced the possibility of being arrested if he returned to Germany. In September, 1933, Thomas, Katia, Gottfried, Monika, Elisabeth and Michael Mann settled in Küsnacht, near Zurich. Erika and Klaus decided to remain in Germany to continue the fight against fascism. (62)

Thomas Mann in Non-Political Exile

It has been argued that if Mann had "not been married to a Jewish woman" and "had his children not been of racially mixed origin'' he might never have left Germany. (63) Thomas Mann wrote in his diary, that he had finally accepted that "something deeply significant and revolutionary be taking place in Germany? The Jews: it is no calamity after all... that the domination of the legal system by the Jews has been ended. Secret, disquieting, persistent musings... I am beginning to suspect that in spite of everything this process is one of those that has two sides to them". (64)

To escape arrest, Heinrich Mann, went to live in Paris. Klaus Mann went to Amsterdam, where he worked for the first emigre journal of anti-fascism, Die Sammlung, which attacked the government in Nazi Germany. Heinrich contributed to the magazine. Thomas Mann condemned the venture and pleaded with his son and brother to withdraw their support for the journal. (65)

During the period Erika Mann worked as a journalist. She later wrote that "the life of every human being in Germany has been fundamentally changed since Adolf Hitler became Chancellor.... German democracy gave way to Nazi dictatorship, the upheaval was as drastic to the private life of the individual as it was to the State." Before Hitler came to power "the German citizen thought of himself as a father, or a Protestant, or a florist, or a citizen of the world, or a pacifist, or a Berliner. Now he is forced to recognise that above all he is a National Socialist." (66)

Erika Mann was especially interested in the impact of Nazi ideology on children. "All the power of the regime - all its cunning, its entire machine of propaganda and discipline - is directed to emphasize the program for German children. It is not surprising that the Nazi State considers it of primary importance that the young grow up according to Hitler's wishes, and the plans set in Mein Kampf... The Führer realizes that the education of German youth will have a tremendous influence on Germany's future - and on Europe's and the world's. He gives the problem the attention it deserves." (67)

Mann reported that "in the winter of 1933, was that all teachers of non-Aryan or Jewish descent were relieved of their posts. An edict was issued on July 11, 1933, that included teachers with all other State officials, ordering them to subordinate their wishes, interests, and demands to the common cause, to devote themselves to the study of National Socialist ideology, and 'suggesting' that they familiarize themselves with Mein Kampf. Three days later, a 'suggestion' was sent to all those who still maintained contact with the Social Democratic Party, that they inform the Nazi Party of the severance of these connections. Committees were formed to see that it was carried out, and whoever hesitated was instantly dismissed. The purge was on. It was decided, in Prussia first (November, 1933), and later in all German schools, that public school teachers must belong to a Nazi fighting organization; they were to come to school in uniform, wherever possible, and live in camps; and, during the final examinations, they were to be tested in military sports." (68)

Erika Mann remained in constant danger. Her friends told her that one way she could protect herself was to marry a foreigner. In 1935, the poet W.H. Auden, who was an homosexual, offered to marry her. She agreed and visited England for the ceremony in Colwall. (69) When the German government heard what she had done, she was stripped of her German citizenship. According to Time Magazine, "at the risk of her life, she returned secretly to Germany to get some of her father's manuscripts." (70)

Thomas Mann - Anti-Fascist

Thomas Mann remained silent on the Nazi crimes and continued to be published in Germany. In 1936, Mann's publisher, Gottfried Bermann, was denounced by exiles as a Jewish protégé of Joseph Goebbels. Mann responded by making a fervent public defence of Bermann. Erika was appalled wrote to her father: "You are stabbing in the back the entire émigré movement - I can put it no other way. Probably you will be very angry at me because of this letter. I am prepared for that, and I know what I’m doing. This friendly time is predestined to separate people – in how many cases has it happened already. Your relation to Dr Bermann and his publishing house is indestructible – you seem to be ready to sacrifice everything for it. In that case it is a sacrifice for you that I, slowly but surely, will be lost for you – then just never mind. For me it is sad, and terrible. I am your child." (71)

Thomas Mann eventually made his thoughts clear in an article in The New Republic: "The deep conviction... that nothing good for Germany or the world can come out of the present German regime, has made me avoid the country in whose spiritual tradition I am more deeply rooted than are those who for three years have been trying to find courage enough to declare before the world that I am not a German. And I feel to the bottom of my heart that I have done right in the eyes of my contemporaries and of posterity." (72)

Thomas Mann and the rest of the family moved to the United States in 1938. That year he published: The Coming Victory of Democracy. In the book he continued his war against totalitarianism. "The revolutionary opportunism and the glow of false dawn in the Fascist tendencies are tainted magic. Fascism is so thoroughly false that honorable youth throughout the world should be ashamed to have anything to do with it." (73)

Erika Mann joined the anti-fascist American Artists' Congress (AAC), a group closely associated with the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). Erika eventually convinced her father to become active in America's anti-fascist movement. In December 1937, she attended a meeting of 400 members of the AAC at Carnegie Hall where she read out a statement from Thomas Mann: "One frequently hears it said that the artist should stick to his own craft, and that he merely cheapens himself when he descends into the political arena to participate in the struggles of the day. I consider this a weak objection, because of my conviction, or rather my clear realization, of the fact that the different spheres of humanity - whether artistic, cultural or political - are really inseparable. And that is why it makes me very happy to see that the art world of a country as large and as important to civilization as the United States... is taking its stand against those barbaric tendencies which today endanger all that we understand by civilization and culture and all that we love." (74)

Mann was employed by Princeton University as a lecturer in the humanities. (75) The FBI kept a close watch on the Mann family as several members were suspected of being secret supporters of the Communist Party of the United States. The FBI snoopers speculated that Erika Mann may have had a sexual relationship with her brother, Klaus Mann. "Confidential informants" told agents that the two were having an affair, one file reports. Erika Mann was described in the files as having her hair cut "in a short mannish bob with a part on the right side" and to be close to a group of political actors who were "members of the Hebrew race". In 1940 Erika agreed to work with the FBI and gave information on members of the German exile community, who she suspected of pro-Nazi connections. (76)

Thomas Mann became involved in the propaganda campaign against Nazi Germany. After the execution of Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl, Christoph Probst, Willi Graf, Alexander Schmorell, Kurt Huber and other members of the White Rose group in 1943, Mann made a radio broadcast where he argued: "Good, splendid young people! You shall not have died in vain; you shall not be forgotten. The Nazis have raised monuments to indecent rowdies and common killers in Germany - but the German revolution, the real revolution, will tear them down and in their place will memorialize these people, who, at the time when Germany and Europe were still enveloped in the dark of night, knew and publicly declared: A new faith in freedom and honor is dawning." (77)

Un-American Activities Committee

After the war the Mann family continued to be under investigation. So were friends such as Hans Eisler and Bertolt Brecht were ordered to appear before the Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Eisler and Brecht both decided to leave the country. Mann described the behaviour of members of the HUAC such as John Rankin and J. Parnell Thomas as "fascistic". In his diary he wrote: "What oath would Congressman Rankin or Thomas take if forced to swear that they hated fascism as much as Communism?" (78)

Brecht told the HUAC: "As a guest of the United States, I refrained from political activities concerning this country even in a literary form. By the way, I am not a screen writer, Hollywood used only one story of mine for a picture showing the Nazi savageries in Prague. I am not aware of any influence which I could have exercised in the movie industry whether political or artistic. Being called before the Un-American Activities Committee, however, I feel free for the first time to say a few words about American matters: looking back at my experiences as a playwright and a poet in the Europe of the last two decades, I wish to say that the great American people would lose much and risk much if they allowed anybody to restrict free competition of ideas in cultural fields, or to interfere with art which must be free in order to be art. We are living in a dangerous world. Our state of civilization is such that mankind already is capable of becoming enormously wealthy but, as a whole, is still poverty-ridden. Great wars have been suffered, greater ones are imminent, we are told. One of them might well wipe out mankind, as a whole. We might be the last generation of the specimen man on this earth. The ideas about how to make use of the new capabilities of production have not been developed much since the days when the horse had to do what man could not do. Do you not think that, in such a predicament, every new idea should be examined carefully and freely? Art can present clear and even make nobler such ideas." (79)

The first ten men accused of being communists: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, John Howard Lawson and Ring Lardner Jr, refused to answer any questions about their political and union activities. Known as the Hollywood Ten, they claimed that the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution gave them the right to do this. The HUAC and the courts during appeals disagreed and all were found guilty of contempt of Congress and each was sentenced to between six and twelve months in prison.

On hearing the news, Thomas Mann issued a statement comparing the activities of the HUAC with those of Nazi Germany: "As an American citizen of German birth and one who has been through it all, I deem it not only my right but my solemn duty to state: We - the America of the Un-American Activities Committee; the America of the so-called loyalty checks... are well on our way towards the fascist police state and - hence - well on our way towards war." (80)

Klaus Mann made several attempts to kill himself. (81) While in Los Angeles in 1948 he attempted suicide by slitting his wrists, taking pills and turning on the gas. Thomas Mann wrote to a friend: "My two sisters committed suicide, and Klaus has much of the elder sister in him. The impulse is present in him, and all the circumstances favour it – the one exception being that he has a parental home on which he can always rely." (82)

At the beginning of January 1949, Klaus Mann wrote in his diary: "I do not wish to survive this year." (83) In April, in Cannes, he received a letter from a West German publisher to say that his novel, Mephisto, could not be published in the country because of the objections of Gustaf Gründgens (the book is a thinly-disguised portrait of Gründgens, who abandoned his conscience to ingratiate himself with the Nazi Party). (84)

Klaus wrote to Erika about his problems with his publisher and his financial difficulties. "I have been luck with my family. One cannot be entirely lonely if one belongs to something and is part of it." (85) Klaus Mann died in of an overdose of sleeping pills on 21st May 1949. (86)

Erika and Thomas Mann were in Stockholm when they heard the news. Thomas wrote: "My inward sympathy with the mother’s heart and with Erika. He should not have done this to them... The hurtful, ugly, cruel inconsideration and irresponsibility." (87) Thomas wrote to Hermann Hesse: "This interrupted life lies heavily on my mind and grieves me. My relationship to him was difficult and not free of guilt. My life put his in a shadow right from the beginning." (88)

Thomas Mann: 1950-1955

Erika Mann, Thomas Mann and his brother Heinrich Mann, continued to be active in left-wing politics. He wrote at the time: "Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist". (89) Heinrich, who was planning to move to East Germany, died on 14th March, 1950. Erika and Thomas were both supporters of the American Peace Crusade. Established by Paul Robeson, William Du Bois and Linus Pauling, it called for a cease-fire in Korea, negotiations with the Soviet Union, and the admission of China to the United Nations. Thomas and Erika were attacked in the press and the New York Times stated that they should avoid anything "which involves... the name of Paul Robeson as you would the Bubonic Plague." (90)

Wladyslaw Moes

Thomas Mann in 1950

The newspaper refused to publish Mann's letter of complaint. Mann told Alfred A. Knopf that Agnes Meyer had been responsible for stopping its publication: "She (Agnes Meyer) threatened me with the loss of my citizenship; accused me of being a traitor to my country; predicted that I would plunge both myself and all those near me into disaster and perdition; and wound up by offering to save my soul." (91)

By 1950, there was a move to deport Erika Mann because they suspected she was a secret member of the Communist Party of the United States. On hearing the news Thomas Mann sold the house in Pacific Palisades in June 1952 and moved to Kilchberg, Switzerland. (92) He commented that "My feeling of being a European became so strong that I had to come back." (93)

Thomas Mann died aged 80, on 12th August 1955. His unfinished novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, was published after his death.

▲ Main Article ▲

Primary Sources

(1) Morten Høi Jensen, Los Angeles Review of Books (25th March, 2016)

During the First World War Thomas Mann had banged triumphantly on the drum of German nationalism; less than a decade later he’d written a novel in which all the death and disease festering in the wound of postwar Europe was laid bare. From declaring democracy to be "foreign and poisonous to the German character," he emerged as an unlikely defender of the embattled Weimar Republic.

Mann’s embrace of liberalism in the 1920s owed something to his discovery of Walt Whitman. During his 1938 lecture tour of America, it was the famous German novelist who reminded his audiences of the importance of Whitman’s celebration of American pluralism. "The world has probably never produced a master of words who has known so well as Whitman how to elevate and translate a social principle such as democracy into intoxicating song," he said, "or how to endow it with such powerful emotional content, representing a magnificent fusion of spirituality and sensuousness."

Before encountering the epiphany that was Whitman, Mann had insisted that the spiritual life - the proper realm of the artist - existed separately from the brouhaha of politics. In his rambling, unwieldy Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), he’d criticized democratic and pacifistic writers like his brother, Heinrich, as progressive, civilized authors pedantically educating their readers in being progressive and civilized... "an astounding, remarkable example," Mann wrote, "of how far, still today, in post-Bismarckian Germany, the German can succeed in self-disgust and alienation, in cosmopolitan devotion and self-renunciation." Many years later, Mann came to see just how wrong he had been; he described a speech by Joseph Goebbels on the future of the German nation as "roughly how I was writing thirty years ago."

Following the debacle of his support for Germany during the First World War, which suspended his relationship with his brother for almost a decade, Mann was reluctant to step back into the political fray. And though he married a Jewish woman and hated everything about the rise of National Socialism, he, like so many of his countrymen, was slow to take its threat seriously. Financially dependent on the German sales of his books, he remained supportive of his Jewish publisher Bermann Fischer’s cautious position toward the new German authorities - a stance deemed unconscionable by a number of émigré writers, including Mann’s own children, Klaus and Erika.

Shortly before Hitler consolidated his power as Führer of Germany, Mann and his family moved to Switzerland, where they remained until the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, when they immigrated to the United States. In those first years of exile Mann feared losing direct access to his German readership, without whom he could not imagine writing. (His first novel, Buddenbrooks, had sold almost six million copies.) He was a German author writing in the German language for German readers - or so he felt. In truth, of course, the Germany he knew and loved was being eroded from within by a termitary of men with somewhat different ideas of what constituted German Kultur.

(2) Colm Tóibín, London Review of Books (6th November, 2006)

Thomas and Katia Mann had six children. It was clear from early on that Katia most loved the second child, Klaus, who was born in 1906, and that Thomas loved Erika, the eldest, born in 1905, and also Elisabeth, born in 1918. The other three – the barely tolerated ones – were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919. Erika remembered a time during the shortages of the First World War when food had to be divided but there was one fig left over. "What did my father do? He gave this fig just to me alone... the other three children stared in horror, and my father said sententiously with emphasis: "One should get the children used to injustice early."

Some things ran in the family. Homosexuality, for instance. Thomas himself was gay most of the time, as his diaries make clear. So were three of his children: Erika (also just most of the time; she made an exception for Bruno Walter, among others), Klaus and Golo. Suicide was a family theme too. Both of Thomas Mann’s sisters committed suicide, as did his sons Klaus and Michael, as did the second wife of his brother Heinrich. Also, gerontophilia. Bruno Walter was almost as old as Erika’s father; and in 1939 Elisabeth married the literary critic Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, who was 36 years her senior.

And then there is the small matter of incest. Much interest in this was fuelled by incidents in Thomas Mann’s own work. In her useful and sympathetic book about the Mann family, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain, Andrea Weiss writes: "Just how much Katia and Klaus Pringsheim loved each other was the subject of public gossip and private distress, especially when Thomas Mann, married to Katia for only a few months, used his wife’s relationship with her brother as the basis for one of his novellas." The novella, Blood of the Walsungs, dealt with the incestuous relationship between a twin brother and sister; Katia’s father attempted to have the story suppressed.

Such rumours also existed about Erika and Klaus, much encouraged by Klaus’s play on the subject, The Siblings, and made their way into Gestapo reports when the siblings went into exile and FBI reports about them once they arrived in America. (In the mid-1920s Klaus helped to keep things in the family by having an affair with Erika’s first husband, Gustaf Gründgens.) In his novel The Volcano, Klaus allowed the character based on his sister to marry the character based on his father. In Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner, the hero, Pope Gregorius, marries his mother – who is also his father’s sister.

In his diaries Thomas Mann made clear his own sexual interest in Klaus: "Am enraptured with Eissi," he wrote in 1920, when Klaus was 14 (Eissi was his nickname), "terribly handsome in his swimming trunks. Find it quite natural that I should fall in love with my son... It seems I am once and for all done with women? Eissi was lying tanned and shirtless on his bed, reading; I was disconcerted." Later that year he "came upon Eissi totally nude and up to some nonsense by Golo’s bed" and was "deeply struck by his radiant adolescent body; overwhelming". He used some of this same language to describe Jacob’s interest in the young Joseph in Joseph and His Brothers, and in the novella Disorder and Early Sorrow, written when Elisabeth was seven, the relationship between the bookish father and his young daughter, clearly based on Mann’s relationship with Elisabeth, is heated and fervid enough to make any reader marvel at what a wonderfully daring imagination the old magician was in possession of.