Book Review Article
Colm Tóibín,
The Magician, NY: Scribner (Simon and Schuster), 2021, 500 pp.
Illustration by Sophia Martineck in NY
Review of Books, June 25, 2026
Early Years
Thomas Mann. Born June 6, 1875 and died August 12, 1955. Better
title: The Mann of the Legerdemain. How typical of him to give even his
birth and death dates artistic form. Reaching his eightieth birthday, he stuck
around a bit over two months longer, then snapped his conjuror’s fingers and ended
things with nice round tombstone numbers: (1875-1955). For most of that long
life Herr Mann didn’t really want to do anything but sit in his study writing
fiction (mornings), then take walks with his wife or read (afternoons). But
Colm Tóibín takes upon himself the task of describing what other things life
and German politics—in cahoots with his infuriating children—forced him to do
and where, all across God’s Green Earth, it forced him to peregrinate.
We begin in the improbable birthplace Lübeck,
northern Germany, 1891, a rather forbidding locale for a creative artist, where
the winds blow cold off the North Sea and local burghers are go for staidness—as
did TM’s elusively cold businessman of a father. They even smile staidly,
rather than broadly, the way that Mann’s ebullient mother from Brazil smiles. Julia
Mann, who tells her children stories about the brightness of Brazilian stars
and all the Brazilian sugar used to make Lübeck’s marzipan.
“The senator,” Mann’s father, eleven years older than his
exotic wife, “in his fastidiousness represented the family firm in all its
solidity, a century of civic excellence.” The family is affluent, living in a
mansion of a house, anchored in a respectable bourgeois life. As he grows older
Heinrich, TM’s older brother by four years, “takes on the heavy gait . . .
associated with old Lübeck and also the ponderous tone of his father’s line.”
Much later in the book we are to realize that even after he becomes a famous
writer of fiction, even after he wins the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929,
Thomas Mann himself is to retain something of that heavy gait: the ponderous
and conservative air of Lübeck, and his father’s love of the fastidious. While
Heinrich becomes a writer with left-wing proclivities, Thomas—who disdains all
proclivities and political poses—never does.
Various ancillary characters propagate the book, including
two sisters and a younger brother Victor, born when Heinrich is nineteen and
Thomas fifteen. Later on we may wonder (I do) why the writer Thomas Mann wanted
so many children (six). One reason, I suspect, is because he grew up in a
household with many siblings. Why, we may also wonder, was TM such a bad
student, apparently excelling at school in nothing whatsoever. After the sudden
death of his father, after Julia has moved to Munich with her three youngest
children and Heinrich sets out on what is to be his literary career, Thomas is
left in Lübeck
to finish school, but his grades are so poor that his mother—along with several
guardians who help her with business and family affairs—decide that the best
possible profession for him is copy clerk.
The death of the paterfamilias, “the senator” (on October
13, 1891, he was only fifty-one) proves to be a highly traumatic business for
the whole family. Upon reading his will and testament they discover that he
has, in effect, disinherited them all. He orders that the family firm be sold
off, as well as the mansion; he expresses his utter disdain for his two eldest sons.
This episode comes as a shock for the reader as well. We are left with a
sketchy portrayal of the father and realize that we know little about him. Why
and how had he come to marry the vivacious and spirited Julia, who seems a
completely inappropriate match for him? How could a man feel such utter
disregard for his children? What inspires a person to depart from this life
with a final gesture of contempt for all of his family? Thomas Mann apparently
never got over the trauma of this incident, although he never rebelled openly against
his father’s treachery. He went about living his life inspired by the very
sedate and stolid behavior exemplified by his sire. But his fictional works
would have made the dull and dignified hair of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann
stand up on end.
During his final years in Lübeck Thomas as schoolboy begins
writing poetry, some of which he sends to his brother Heinrich, the budding
literary man. Heinrich, we learn later, held this poetry in low regard, just as
later he is to denigrate his brother’s more celebrated prose fiction. Mired in
what you might call “older brother syndrome,” to the end of his days, Heinrich spent
a lifetime treating his famous sibling with condescension. Before leaving
school Thomas indulges in an early homosexual attraction for another boy: “When
Thomas wrote a poem about wanting to rest his head on his lover’s breast, or
walk with his lover in the deepening twilight to a place of beauty where they
would be fully alone, when he spoke of the urge he felt to intertwine with the
soul of his loved one, the figure he imagined, the object of his desire, was
Armin Martens.”
In an early Mann story, “Tonio Kröger (1903),” featuring the
making of the literary artist as a young man, the stand-in for TM himself has
this strange first name since his effusive mother has named him after her
brother Antonio. Tonio is “the son of Consul Kröger, whose grain sacks with
the firm name in great black letters you might see any day driven through the
streets; his large old ancestral home was the finest house in all the town.”
The stand-in for Armin Martens in this story is Hans Hansen, for whom Tonio
feels an unrequited love. But in the fiction Tonio’s affections soon turn to a
schoolgirl, blond and vacuous Ingeborg Holm. Apparently no such turning toward
heterosexuality occurred in young Thomas Mann’s early life. If it did, Tóibín
never tells us about it. He is intent, throughout the whole five hundred pages
of his book, on treating Mann’s latent homosexuality, which rarely results in
actual physical homosexual acts. One of the most astonishing facts of the whole
of TM’s life: this man, whose sexual inclinations were centered almost
exclusively on pedophilia, had a happy marriage and sired six children.
The Prose Writer as
Prodigy
In 1893 Thomas, having left school, joins his family in
Munich, which will be at the center of his life for all of his remaining years
in Germany. Quietly rebelling against his mother and Lübeck guardians, who try
to force him to work as a clerk in a business office, he sets about
establishing his career as a writer. He has stories accepted for publication
and soon (age 22) he is working on his first novel, the lengthy Buddenbrooks,
set in Lübeck. “For this book he would re-create himself as an only child and
make his mother a delicate, musical German heiress . . . The hero would not be
a person, but the family firm itself. And the atmosphere of mercantile
confidence in Lübeck would be the background, but the firm would be doomed, as
the only son of the family would be doomed.”
Published in two volumes, Buddenbrooks (1901) is not
well received back in stolid Lübeck, and the Mann sisters, Carla and Lula,
wonder why they have not been included as characters, but Julia Mann loves the
prototype of herself and shows the novel to all her friends. At age twenty-six TM
is an established and well-respected writer in Munich. The way Tóibín tells the
story everything seems to happen too fast. On one page the protagonist is
twenty-two and five pages later he’s pushing thirty. Such is the case for the
whole of this book, in which the author is forced to pack a long life into a
mere five hundred pages. Want to write your book at the leisurely pace that
life itself sometimes takes? Fine, but your opus will come out at a thousand
pages.
The reader (me) wonders, for all that, how could this young
writer have learned so easily the craft of writing fiction? How could he have
been so rapidly accepted by major publishers? Most writers of prose fiction
don’t develop until their thirties or forties. How in the world did TM have the
experience and knowhow to compose most of this huge, two-volume family novel
before he was even twenty-five?
With the publication of his first book comes a steady income
and even a modicum of fame. TM begins going out in Munich society, attending
performances and plays, operas with his sister Carla, who is interested in
becoming an actress. At the theater he begins noticing the Pringsheim family,
Jewish (but not practicing Jews), assimilated, affluent. The brother (Klaus),
and sister (Katia) of the family, who are twins, project a sort of “youthful
arrogance and insouciance.” The whole family has a reputation; the Pringsheims
are rumored to be highly intelligent and talented. Klaus is a musician who has
studied with Gustav Mahler; Katia studies mathematics and science. The father
is a professor, a mathematician and “fanatical Wagnerian.” The early mention of
German classical music here is telling, as later on in his life TM is
enthralled with the German composers and proud of their achievements. Tóibín’s
book emphasizes the high art of German culture, how for many years TM takes
pride in being a part of it, then how the Nazis are to drag German culture down
with them, into crudeness and cruelty, despicable squalor.
As for the Pringsheims, even before he gets to know them TM
decides that “these were the sort of people he wanted to be.” When he meets the
twins at their mansion, where a soirée is in progress, TM is fascinated by
both brother and sister, by “a world filled with elegant people and rich
interiors, with [intellectual] conversations going on that were both clever and
oddly inconsequential. He did not mind that the décor was perhaps too rich, and
that some of the people were too effusive.”
Meanwhile, Tóibín describes a homosexual encounter with Herr
Huhnemann, a middle-aged man whom TM had known casually as a fellow employee,
back when he worked briefly as a clerk. “What happened between them seemed
natural,” but when Huhnemann leaves “Thomas began to believe that he had not
actually wanted what had occurred . . . Once he had dressed himself, he felt
the deep revulsion he should have felt as soon as Huhnemann had made his
intentions plain.” Throughout this long book several other homosexual episodes
are described, most involving an older TM’s attraction to adolescent boys, but
never does the writer seem to accept his feelings as “natural.” After the Huhnemann
encounter “what disturbed him most was his own reaction. He had wanted to be
kissed and touched, even by Huhnemann,” a busybody and fool who at work had
always annoyed him.
On the same page as the above citation TM makes a decision
that will affect the whole remainder of his life. “He would ask Katia
Pringsheim to marry him. If she refused, he would ask her again. Once the dream
of marrying her came into his mind, he felt a new sort of contentment.” The
writer/biographer frequently enters the mind of his subject and tells us what
TM was thinking/feeling. And frequently the reader (me) wonders where Tóibín
gets his facts. I can only conclude that he has been reading TM’s private
diaries.
TM is aware of “the chasm” between himself and the twins,
Katia and Klaus. “They were musicians and scientists. Each one of them excelled
at something. And each one of them would inherit a fortune.” He is probably
also aware that Katia is somewhat reluctant to marry him. She is only
twenty-one, eight years younger than him. Then again, she is aware that he is
more physically attracted to her twin brother Klaus than he is to her. “Klaus
understood the effect he could have on Thomas, how he could draw Thomas’ eyes
from his sister to himself. The game Klaus played with Thomas appeared to amuse
Katia.” No mention is ever made of Katia’s sexual attractiveness. One of TM’s
homosexual friends warns him, “Marriage is not for you.” TM knows that to be
true, but, at least the way that Tóibín tells the tale, he goes against his
natural inclinations to become a husband, and, eventually, father.
In the matter of his sexuality, we never know exactly where
Thomas Mann stands. Tóibín gives us occasional hints. “A few times in the weeks
before the wedding, Thomas managed to kiss Katia, but her twin brother hovered
too much for him to be comfortable . . .” This is the only time in the whole
five hundred pages of Tóibín’s book where Thomas Mann is described kissing a
female. In the middle of a conversation between TM and Klaus, Katia comes into
the room and asks Klaus, “Who enchants you?” He replies, “You do, my twin, my
double, my delight. Only you.” Then he goes on to ask, “Who wrote the rule that
twins cannot marry each other?”
“Thomas, as he examined the twins, one of whom he was to
marry, realized that he would never be completely included in the little world
they created.” Was this the way he wanted things? We readers find ourselves
right in the middle of an altogether kinky business. Later the kinkiness will
be embodied in TM’s astonishing story, “The Blood of the Walsungs.”
In February of 1905 Thomas Mann is married to Katharina
Hedwig Pringsheim. After the marriage the newlyweds take a honeymoon trip to Zürich.
Surprisingly enough, Klaus does not accompany them. In the grand hotel Baur au
Lac, Tóibín imagines for us TM’s imaginings: “Throughout the meal, he imagined
Katia naked, her white skin, her full lips, her small breasts, her strong legs.
As she spoke, her voice low, he saw that she could easily be a boy.” This is
followed by a long paragraph describing the first time they make love. In the
middle of this sex scene our biographer describes how TM “became hesitant,
almost afraid.” But our biographer/novelist was not in that bed with them. How
much of this description did he get from TM’s own diaries or biographical
writings, and how much of it did he make up himself?
The Blood of the Walsungs (Wälsungenblut)
We interrupt this biographical work of fiction to delve more
deeply into the story TM wrote later that same year, a tale of incest, of loving
twins, who are soon to be separated by marriage. The translator from the German
(in my copy) is H.T. Lowe-Porter.
From the very first page, describing the sounding of a gong
calling the family to their meal (precisely at twelve noon), we are in the
presence of extreme irony. This is a work of fiction about the coddled, spoiled
and idle existence of a very rich family, modelled, obviously, on the family
that TM has just married into, the Pringsheims.
Each member of the family is depicted satirically,
sardonically. The paterfamilias, Herr Aarenhold appears first, “in his toddle
out of the library,” where he has been busying himself with old books he has
acquired, “first editions, in many languages, costly and crumbling trifles.”
His wife, Frau Aarenhold, is described as a near total idiot, “small, ugly,
prematurely aged and shriveled,” sporting a bizarre coiffure that both her
husband and children have persistently advised her against. She speaks in a guttural
language and says nothing of interest. There are four children in the family,
but the main protagonists of the story are the twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde,
named after the incestuous Volsung twins in Wagner’s opera Die Walküre
(The Valkyrie).
“Siegmund and Sieglinde came last [to the dinner table],
hand in hand, from the second floor. They were twins, graceful as young fawns,
and with immature figures despite their nineteen years. She wore a Florentine
cinquecento frock of claret-coloured velvet, too heavy for her slight body.
Siegmund had on a green jacket suit with a tie of raspberry shantung,
patent-leather shoes on his narrow feet, and cuff-buttons set with small
diamonds. He had a strong growth of black beard but kept it so close-shaven that
his sallow face with the heavy gathered brows looked no less boyish than his
figure. His head was covered with thick black locks parted far down on one side
and growing low on his temples. Her dark brown hair was waved in long, smooth
undulations over her ears, confined by a gold circlet. A large pearl—his
gift—hung down upon her brow. Round one of his boyish wrists was a heavy gold
chain—a gift from her. They were very like each other, with the same slightly
drooping nose, the same full lips lying softly together, the same prominent
cheek-bones and black, bright eyes. Likest of all were their long slim hands,
his no more masculine than hers, save that they were slightly redder. And they
always went hand in hand, heedless that the hands of both inclined to
moisture.”
The improbable suitor of the story, engaged to Sieglinde, is
the thirty-five-year old von Beckerath, whom the twins treat with open disdain.
Although he “comes from a good family,” Beckerath has none of the elegance of
dress so important to the twins. He has no or little interest in classical
music, or high art, or literature, all of which obsess them. Tóibín suggests
that Mann may have based his pedestrian physical description on the dullard bourgeois
husband of his sister Lula. Putting this character in his story as a representative
of himself, the bridegroom, must have struck TM as a hilarious private joke.
Utterly contemptuous of Beckerath, the brother and sister twins seem to view
the fact that Sieglinde has agreed to marry him as another huge joke. There is,
in fact, no good reason for this marriage. But then, why did Katia Mann—at age
twenty-one and living a life of luxury that appeared to suit her, engaged in
scientific research inspired by her professor father, indulging herself in
dressing with high style, in appreciation of the arts—want to marry a writer
from distant stodgy Lübeck, Thomas Mann?
The story consists largely of only two scenes. The first
depicts the family gathered at the dining table, along with their guest
Beckerath. Everything is described as overly ornate and luxurious. This family
dwells—to a ludicrous extent—in affluent splendor. On the table “a tapering
glass vase holding two orchids stood at each place, on the glistening,
spotless, faultlessly ironed damask cloth.” There are three copies of the
luncheon menu on the table: “bouillon with beef marrow, sole au vin blanc,
pheasant, and pineapple.” Over the meal Herr Aarenhold, depicted as a garrulous
buffoon, expatiates on a variety of topics. He insists, e.g., on the necessity
of enjoying one’s food, making of every meal “a little celebration.” He
admonishes Beckerath that—through marriage into this family—he is about to
begin living in a manner “a good deal more elevated.” Herr Aarenhold asserts
that “every morning that God lets me wake up I have a little thrill because my
bed-cover is made of silk,” a line that, according to Tóibín, was taken directly
out of the mouth of Herr Pringsheim.
Aarenhold feels embarrassed, aware that his own children
“despised him: for his origins [lowly, Jewish], for the blood that flowed in
his veins and through him in theirs [the blood of the title, Jewish]; for the
way he had earned his money [through speculation] . . . for his weak and
whimsical loquacity.” When they discuss the approaching wedding, Herr Aarenhold
continues doing most of the talking. Holding hands at the table, Sigmund and Sieglinde
display little interest, as if the matter did not even concern them. They have
a kind of “understanding from which everybody else was excluded.”
Discussing abstract principles, the family at the table
“talked nineteen to the dozen, attacked each other with steely and abstract
dialectic.” By the time dull Beckerath has gathered himself up to join the
conversation they have already moved on to a new topic. In speaking of art and
the theatre, “with their spoilt, dissatisfied faces” they present themselves as
experts. “Their highest praise was a grudging acceptance, their criticism deft
and ruthless.” Siegmund suddenly announces that he and Sieglinde want to go
together that evening to see a performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre,
which, of course, features the Volsung twins, after whom they are named. They
wish to view the opera as a special last thing to do together, before they are
separated by the upcoming wedding. Beckerath volunteers to go as well, but
Siegmund announces that they want to go without him, and he quickly demurs.
The second scene of the story features only the twins. First,
we have a description of Siegmund’s dressing for an hour, grooming himself
excessively before leaving for the opera. We learn that he has his father’s
habit of idly reading and collecting fictional works; he reads not for pleasure
but in order to critique the writing. He has spent an hour that morning with
the professor whom his father pays handsomely to give him lessons, “developing
Siegmund’s talent for drawing and painting.” But then we learn straightaway
that he has no talent for painting, and he is perfectly aware of that himself.
He is a dilletante, as are all the Aarenholds. He “had been born into
superfluity. Everything about him is superfluous; . . . the accoutrements of
life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was
left for life itself.”
Siegmund does nothing with his time but dress himself to
excess. He has no friends and only one companion, his sister Sieglinde, “his
exquisitely groomed, darkly beautiful counterpart, whose moist and slender hand
he held while the richly gilded, empty-eyed hours slipped past.” The two are
“self-centered invalids who absorb themselves in trifles . . . they doffed
aside the evil-smelling world and loved each other alone, for the priceless
sake of their own rare uselessness.” In preparing for the opera Siegmund washes
and perfumes himself, in an attempt (say critics of this story) to purify
himself from the dark stain of Jewishness that afflicts his blood. His sister
knocks and comes in. They kiss each other’s hands, love one another “sweetly,
sensually . . . they played together like puppies, biting each other with their
lips.”
At the opera, sitting in their private box apart from all
other spectators, they watch a performance that features, obliquely,
themselves. The Siegmund of Wagner sings of how his twin sister has been
carried off. He is of a strange breed of men. “A curse had lain upon him
forever, he was marked by the brand of his strange origins . . . he had borne
the yoke of scorn and hatred and contempt—all because he was strange, of a
breed and kind hopelessly different.” Wagner’s Siegmund and Sieglinde have a
“brother-sister love” [incestuous] that will be their revenge on the world that
disdains them for their “dark origins.”
With their usual stance of condescension, the twins have
nothing but criticism for the performance. After the first act they speak to no
one else in the audience, maintaining their icy distance from all and sundry. But
a few sparse details suggest that they are moved by the way the plot echoes
their own dark origins and their total isolation in each other from the world
at large. During the second act “pain gnawed and burned in Siegmund’s breast”
as he watched, “a drawing anguish that was somehow sweet, a yearning.” His
life, “so full of cleverness, so empty of emotion,” succumbs somewhat to that
anguish. During the intermission he seems to sense that his sister has been
moved as well. “Upon her cheeks burned the same fire that he felt in his own.”
Late in the opera Brünnhilde, the Walküre,
saves Sieglinde, “in whose womb there grew and waxed the seed of that hated
unprized race, chosen of the gods, from which the twins had sprung.” Mann’s story
ends with the twins back home in an empty house, where they consummate their
love sexually, thereby sealing themselves in a compact confirming the dark
origins of their race and taking a kind of revenge on the outside world. As for
Beckerath and the wedding soon to come, Siegmund announces (in the final line
of the story), he “ought to be grateful to us. His existence will be a little
less trivial from now on.”
Although never explicitly stated, the Jewishness of the
Aarenhold family is much emphasized. One example: Siegmund back in his room.
“Long he looked at each mark of his race; the slightly drooping nose, the full
lips that rested so softly on each other.” For an in-depth analysis of this
story, see an article by Gloria Chasson Erlich, “Race and Incest in Mann’s
‘Blood of the Walsungs,’” originally published in Studies in 20th
and 21st Century Literature (1978) and available now online. Concentrating
on “the troubled psychology of the assimilated Jew” in this work, Erlich points
out that the original ends with a line never published in any extant German or
English version. Using two Yiddish words in one sentence, Siegmund declares,
“We’ve conned him—the Goy!” She cites Klaus Pringsheim as asserting that TM got
the Yiddish word beganeft (conned) from his father-in-law, who had no
idea how the word would be used in a fiction. Erlich’s interesting article also
discusses the story in relation to themes of Jewishness and race in many other
of Mann’s fictional works.
We have digressed here quite far afield from the Tóibín book
under review, in order to suggest how daring, even intrepid, Thomas Mann could
be in choosing themes and plots for his fictions. With “The Blood of the
Walsungs” he leaves himself open to accusations of anti-Semitism, and with some
good reason. In January, 1906, the story was scheduled for publication in a
journal and was already set in print. Unaware at first, apparently, of what a
hot item he and his muse had cooked up, TM suddenly withdrew “The Blood” from
publication. Only in 1921 was it published in a small, privately printed
edition of 520 copies, entirely sold out before publication, and it did not
appear in early editions of Mann’s Collected Works (see Erlich article).
It was as if TM realized, belatedly, one, or both, of two things: first, that
he had simply gone too far in writing a work on the theme of Jewishness and
Jewish assimilation; second, that he had written a mean-spirited, satirical travesty
of the very family he had just married into.
Tóibín’s book provides further details about how the
Pringsheim family responded to “The Blood of the Walsungs.” He describes how TM
wrote the story with his new bride Katia in the next room. “He enjoyed hearing
Katia move around the apartment as he created a fictional version of her, a
girl who always held hands with her twin brother.” When he finished the story
he had certain misgivings. “Aware that the Pringsheims did not like being
categorized, he knew they would disapprove of the open way in which the family
was described as Jewish” [what an understatement!]. After giving the story to
his wife to read he was “surprised at her calm response.” Not only did she
declare her approval of the work, but a few days later she said her mother and
brother had asked him to come to their house and read it to them.
Softening certain details, he read the story to the
Pringsheims (minus the paterfamilias), and once again they surprised him. None
of the three, mother or twins, voiced any objections. Wagner lovers all, they
all expressed their appreciation of the Wagner theme. TM sent the story off for
publication. Meanwhile, Katia was about to give birth to their first child,
Erika. A young editor who had been shown the story remarked to TM, “How brave,
we thought, to write a story about twins when you are married to one! I have a
friend who wondered whether you have a great imagination or have married into
the most peculiar family in Munich.”
The proverbial “shit hit the fan” when Herr Pringsheim heard
rumors about the content of the story. Did he actually read it? We are not
told, but he flew into a rage and confronted TM. Accusing him of “anti-Semite views,” he
demanded that the story be withheld from publication. Which it was. The scene
of the confrontation is sketchy, but Tóibín describes how the three Pringsheims
who had been at the reading remained unperturbed. The mother declares, “I
actually thought it was quite sweet.” Katia smiles and says, “Klaus is rather
sorry that the story is not to appear. It would provide him with a reputation.
He says he didn’t have one before.”
This bizarre episode raises a number of questions about
Thomas Mann and about his marriage into the Pringsheim family. Why, for
example, would he wish to marry Katia if he realized that the twins would
always be united in their own adamant twinness, leaving him as the perpetual
outsider? What were his deepest feelings about Jewishness and were they as
ambivalent as the story suggests? After hearing herself and her family depicted
in almost burlesque terms, how could Katia, only recently married to TM, have reacted
to this fictional work so serenely? Food for thought. Mann’s reaction to the
birth of his first child, Erika, is noteworthy. In a letter to his brother
Heinrich (not cited in Tóibín’s book) he expressed disappointment (he wanted a
boy) but remarked that he was amused at times when he could see in the child
“just a bit of Jewishness” showing through from his wife’s side of the family.
Death in Venice
In May of 1911 Thomas, Katia and Heinrich were on vacation, staying
at an Adriatic resort on the Dalmatian coast when they decided to move on to
Venice. They booked rooms at the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido. News came,
meanwhile, that the composer Gustav Mahler had died. TM knew him personally, as
did the Pringsheims. “In our house Mahler was much loved,” said Katia . . .
Klaus, my brother, was in love with him.” TM considered bringing a Mahler-like
figure to Venice, as a character in a story, but settled on the idea of depicting
a famous writer at the same hotel where he was staying.
At the Grand Hotel TM observes a Polish family staying there
and, in particular the pre-adolescent boy of the family. Katia notices that her
husband is intrigued by the boy, but deliberately places herself apart from the
situation. “Waiting for her in the lobby, he tried to remember how much she
knew about him. He felt it was during that very first meeting with her in her
parents’ house, when she and her brother Klaus spoke to him. It was as though
she had used Klaus as a decoy, or as bait. She saw the man who would become her
husband watching her brother . . . Written into their set of tacit agreements
was a clause stating that just as Thomas would do nothing to put their domestic
happiness in jeopardy, Katia would recognize the nature of his desires without
any complaint.”
They hear rumors of cholera in Naples, and in his fictional
story TM decides to bring the cholera to Venice. “He would mix the desire of
the older man [Aschenbach, a kind of alter ego of himself] with a sense of
disease, decay.” So comes to be written, by a sedate father of four, a story
about a man who falls in love with a boy.
As Colm Tóibín certainly must have realized, in writing a
novel about the life of a renowned writer of fiction, he would end up leaving
out detailed treatment of the most important thing: the fiction. But his book
is already five hundred pages long, and if he includes literary criticism of
Mann’s fiction it will be at least twice as long. The story Death in Venice,
however, is the perfect example of how much the reader misses, if that reader
limits himself to Tóibín’s five hundred pages and takes no notice of TM’s literary
works.
In my opinion—and not only mine—Death in Venice is an
astonishingly brilliant work of fiction. Let me begin by citing certain
passages from this long story, or novella—in H.T. Lowe-Porter’s translation
from the German. Here is the description of the first encounter with the boy:
“Round a wicker table next to him was gathered a group of young folk in charge
of a governess or companion—three young girls, perhaps fifteen to seventeen
years old, and a long-haired boy of about fourteen. Aschenbach noticed with
astonishment the lad’s perfect beauty. His face recalled the noblest moment of
Greek sculpture—pale, with a sweet reserve, with clustering honey-coloured
ringlets, the brow and nose descending in one line, the winning mouth, the
expression of pure and godlike serenity. Yet with all this chaste [note the
word choice] perfection of form it was of such unique personal charm that the
observer thought he had never seen, either in nature or art, anything so
utterly happy and consummate.”
Replete with references to classical Greek imagery, the
story appears to be doing what Aschenbach does persistently throughout the
narrative. The physical attraction is left to lurk behind what he deludes
himself into believing: that he is engaged as a literary artist in
“contemplation of higher things.” Nowhere in the story is there direct mention
of sexual attraction, in a story that features, precisely, sexual attraction of
a more than dubious sort (pedophilia). Aschenbach begins writing an essay on
“the model of Tadzio’s beauty; that page and a half of choicest prose, so
chaste [note the word choice], so lofty, so poignant with feeling, which would
shortly be the wonder and admiration of the multitude . . . Strange hours
indeed, these were, and strangely unnerving the labour that filled them!
Strangely fruitful intercourse [note the word choice] this, between one body
and another mind! When Aschenbach put aside his work and left the beach he felt
exhausted, he felt broken—conscience reproached him, as it were after a
debauch.” There you have it. A debauch. Mann makes it clear what is going on.
As the story progresses the sexual obsession of the middle-aged man
intensifies, until finally, after Tadzio smiles at him, Aschenbach “whispered
the hackneyed phrase of love and longing . . . I love you!”
Meanwhile, an epidemic of cholera has descended upon Venice,
although those dependent on the tourist industry do their best to conceal the
situation. After he learns what is up, Aschenbach considers warning Tadzio’s
mother and then fleeing Venice himself. Then he does neither the one nor the
other, since “that would restore him, would give him back himself once more;
but he who is beside himself revolts at the idea of self-possession.” To the
thing always most important to him, “his art, his moral sense,” the infatuated
artist now prefers “the boons that chaos might confer.”
To illustrate the power of this story I would have to quote
a good many other passages. Absolutely wonderful, for example, is the part when
the street singers come to the hotel to serenade the unsuspecting guests on the
terrace. Their performance ends with a song featuring a laughing, mocking
refrain. The guests, it seems, are at least half aware that they are being
mocked, although they are not aware exactly how (the singers know about the
cholera, the guests do not). Notwithstanding this, the laughter, like the
cholera, is contagious. Everyone laughs along with the vulgar singers: the
waiters, the lift-boys, the servants, the guests themselves. The atrocious
laughter, like the Asiatic cholera, runs amuck. What a scene, and the story is
full of such powerful writing.
After he finished Death in Venice TM gave it to Katia
to read. He asked her if she thought there would be any objection to it; should
he withhold it from publication? “You are the most respectable man anyone has
ever met [she answered]. But the story will change things. It will change how
the world sees Venice. And I presume it will change how the world sees you.” After
publication of this work on the theme of pedophilia, however, there apparently
was no great outcry in critical reactions. “The only forceful objection came
from an uncle-by-marriage of Katia, who was outraged by the story, seeing no
metaphors in it at all, writing to Katia’s father: ‘What a story! And a married
man with a family!’” But Death in Venice, along with The Blood of the
Walsungs, illustrates that while TM always went about, his whole life long,
disguised as respectable bourgeois citizen, the fiction writer inside him could
be daring, even outrageous. Years later, when TM and the family had relocated
to Los Angeles, Katia’s effete brother Klaus Pringsheim came for a visit. While
there he brought up the subject of Death in Venice, remarking that “I
made many friends because of the book, pederasts all” (418).
The Magic Mountain,
The Nobel Prize, War and Political Turmoil
In 1912 “an old tubercular spot on one of Katia’s lungs
appeared again, . . . it was decided that she should go to Davos in Switzerland
for treatment.” At this time TB, known as consumption or phthisis, was the
scourge of Europe, an incurable disease responsible for a quarter of all deaths
on the European continent. Only years later, when she had lived into her
eighties, a doctor who examined new images of her lungs informed Katia that
there was no evidence she had ever had TB. But her stay in Davos was the
genesis of one of TM’s most famous and detailed works, The Magic Mountain.
There are now four children in the family: Erika
(1905-1969), Klaus (1906-1949), Gottfried (Golo, 1909-1994), and Monika
(1910-1992). By the time they are six and five years old the two eldest
children are already headstrong and unruly. With their mother away in Davos
they decide that they can behave in any way they like.
In 1914 war is on the horizon, TM is writing The Magic
Mountain, and Katia has returned home. Klaus Pringsheim expresses his
political sympathies with France. When together the twins Katia and Klaus “take
up their old sardonic poses,” and make TM “feel as if they were laughing at
him.” Now, as if in mockery of the story “Blood of the Walsungs,” two more
“twins”—in constant rebellion against conventionality—have appeared: Erika and
Klaus Mann. The family has taken up something of the same lifestyle that the
Pringsheims lived when Katia and Klaus were young; they dwell in a mansion in
Munich and enjoy the comforts of the rich. From his childhood, and all the way
through the rest of his life, TM was always to live a life of affluence.
In the year before the war begins the writer Ernst Bertram
becomes friendly with TM. Bertram is a homosexual who—probably because of Death
in Venice—takes Thomas to be “a kindred spirit.” Some of his ideas at that
time influenced TM. “Bertram spoke of Germany’s destiny; the deep roots that
culture had in her soil, the way in which German music expressed and uplifted
the German spirit. Gradually, instead of discussing the work of Nietzsche,
about whom Bertram was writing a treatise, they began to discuss Germany’s
singularity, how her very cultural strength caused her neighbors to isolate
her. The only solution to this, Bertram believed, was war. Once the war was
won, then Germany could exert her influence throughout Europe.” Dangerous
ideas.
Thoroughly immersed in such ideas about the glories of
German culture, TM supported the German war effort. His brother Heinrich,
meanwhile, ever the cosmopolitan and leftist, opposed the war, taking part in
meetings of antiwar socialists in Munich. Only after the Nazis were to take
over Germany, adopting and thoroughly corrupting German culture, would TM give
up his veneration of German classical music and high art.
Soon after the Great War ended with Germany’s defeat in
1918, TM found himself living as a kind of alien in his own city of Munich. For
the first time in his life his comfortable bourgeois existence was threatened. Supported
in spirit by his own children, Erika and Klaus (now aged 13 and 12), young
socialists seize political control of Munich and begin terrorizing the upper
classes. Members of prominent upper-middle-class families are taken as
hostages; some are shot. Among those threatened is Katia’s father, the
university professor. When he learns the names of the socialist leaders, Ernst
Toller and Erich Mühsam, TM laughs, since he knows these young men only as
gentle poets. Later, after the Munich Revolt is put down, he is to hear that he
was on a list of those to be arrested, possibly shot, but these very poets put
in a good word for him, invoking his brother Heinrich’s name.
During the Munich Revolt the Manns consider fleeing to
Switzerland. In an eerie way this incident presages all of the political
turmoil that is to hound TM and his family for the rest of his life. The young
leftwing idealists resorting to violence are precursors of the rightwing thugs
who are soon to take over Germany under the leadership of Hitler. Meanwhile,
the Manns go on having babies. Number five is Elisabeth (1918-2002); number six
is Michael (1919-1977).
By 1922 all of Germany is engulfed in horrendous inflation,
but TM is making big money from the sales of his books abroad. Having put aside
his writing of The Magic Mountain during the war, he publishes it to
worldwide acclaim. Already openly homosexual and rebellious while still in
school, Erika and Klaus revel in the turmoil of the times and the politics of
the left. At age eighteen and seventeen they move to Berlin to take up their
bohemian life in theatrical circles; soon they are known throughout Germany for
their flamboyance. Although apparently never committing incest, Erika and Klaus
reprise the motif of incest associated with the Pringsheim twins and the twins in
Mann’s story of the Walsungs. An actress now, Erika is engaged to marry the
actor Gustaf Gründgens, later to have a highly successful career as film
actor and theater director, even during the Nazi period and afterward. On a
visit home Klaus confides in his parents that “while his sister was engaged to
Gründgens,
she was, in fact, still in love with Pamela Wedekind and, while he himself was
in love with Gründgens, he was still engaged to Pamela.” Klaus has become a
writer now, one, however, who never goes in for the hard solitary work
characteristic of his writer-father.
Meanwhile, TM’s mother Julia has died. His sister Lula, after
being widowed, follows a pattern in her life similar to that of sister Carla,
who had committed suicide in 1910. Taking morphine and having affairs, Lula
ends up a suicide as well (in 1927). “When Carla went,” says brother Heinrich,
“part of me followed her. And now Lula. Soon we will all be gone.”
In 1929 TM is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His
most renowned works of fiction at that time were Buddenbrooks, Death
in Venice, and The Magic Mountain. This event coincided with the
rise of the Nazis in Germany, and Thomas told himself that “it would perhaps
bring him readers, but it would also bring him trouble.” How right he was. “The
award marked him further for the Nazis. The very culture he had represented
since the war—bourgeois, cosmopolitan, balanced, unpassionate—was the very one
that they were most determined to destroy. The tone he used in his
prose—ponderous, ceremonious, civilized—was the precise opposite of the tone
they wielded.”
Making a speech in Berlin, titled “An Appeal to Reason,” TM
is shouted down by organized Nazi hecklers in the crowd. He realizes that he
will not be allowed to make further public appearances. Meanwhile Erika and
Klaus derive even more energy from the vulgarity and viciousness all around
them in Weimar Germany, where the vibrant cultural landscape seemed to
contribute somehow to the imminent death of democracy. They travel to the U.S.,
cross America by train, then make a trip around the world, visiting Japan,
Korea and Russia. In 1931 Erika, along with childhood friend Ricki Hallgarten,
enters a 10,000-kilometer motor-rally race around Europe, and they end up
winning the event. Their wild escapades are suddenly brought to a halt when
their proposed trip to Persia ends in a fiasco; their friend and fellow
traveler, Hallgarten has suddenly shot himself in the heart.
Early Years of Exile
In February, 1933, just four weeks after Hitler is appointed
Chancellor of Germany, there is an arson attack on the parliament building, the
Reichstag. At that time Thomas and Katia are on holiday in Switzerland. Soon
all civil liberties in Germany are suspended, and there are mass arrests of
communists and socialists. Although they are unaware at the time, this event
marks the beginning of the Manns’ life as perpetual emigres. TM is fearful of
returning to his home in Munich, but he cannot speak out against the Nazis
since his son Golo and his wife’s parents remain there. Despite their lifelong
assimilation, the Pringsheims are now considered Jews, and in danger of being
arrested, their home and assets appropriated.
In a letter to Katia from her father he writes, “We have
always tried to be loyal Germans. I have loved the music of Wagner and I have
done everything to support him, including to create Bayreuth. The only glimmer
of hope in all this darkness has come from Winifred Wagner [British-born wife
of Siegfried Wagner, the composer’s son, she was also a personal friend of
Hitler], and that is most unlikely as she is an ardent supporter of the man
whose name I will not spell out.”
“How strange it is [said Katia], that we are now Jewish. My
parents never went near a synagogue. And I thought of the children as pure
Manns, but now they are Jewish because their mother is Jewish.” Remaining for a
time at the Mann residence in Munich, Golo managed to withdraw large sums of
money from his father’s bank account. Unlucky in his political fate, TM always
seemed to have luck when it came to money. During the horrendous inflation in Weimar
Germany he earned enormous sums in dollars and lived in luxury.
TM’s greatest fear was that his personal diaries—which
remained in a safe at the Munich home—would be seized by the Nazis and used
against him. In those diaries he had openly revealed his sexual attraction to
boys. He had even written at one point about how he was aroused by his own son
Klaus, his body in a swimsuit or naked. Some sections of the diaries described
his feelings for a boy, Klaus Heuser, whom he had first met in the summer of
1927. The boy even came to visit the Manns for a time, since he had befriended
the daughters, Monika and Elisabeth. Eventually Katia—always aware of her
husband’s sexual proclivities—subtly suggested to Heuser that it was time for
him to return home. With the help of Golo, who removed the diaries from the
safe, they were eventually returned to TM in Switzerland, where he burned some
of their pages.
After the Nazis had seized total control of Germany, the
Manns (including the children) were never to return to live there. Their exile
began with a move to the south of France, where many other German and Austrian intellectuals
had congregated (Walter Benjamn, Stefan Zweig). “Bertolt Brecht, he saw, was a
great troublemaker, moving from one café to another, spreading dissent. It
amazed him that Ernst Toller had also turned up in Sanary and was being
listened to as though his opinion mattered. Others came and went, including
Heinrich Mann, who was based mainly in Nice and wrote a regular column in
French . . . in which he excoriated Hitler and his regime.” Heinrich’s former
wife Mimi, along with his daughter Goschi, are trapped in Prague, where they
will live out the years of the coming war.
Ernst Toller, once the rather improbable “President of the
Bavarian Soviet Republic” (during the Munich Revolt) is the man responsible for
saving TM and his family at a time when prominent bourgeois citizens were being
arrested, even shot. He meets with TM and asks his help in freeing Erich Mühsam,
another of the Munich revolutionaries, now held and being tortured by the
Nazis. This is a situation that will repeat itself throughout TM’s years of
exile, and it is a constant source of frustration for him. Although he has fame
and financial resources, he has no influence with those who could help Germans
in desperate straits, such as Mühsam. Many people, including his own
children Klaus and Erika, are constantly urging him to denounce Hitler openly,
but he is cautious about so doing, protective of relatives and friends who
remain in Germany, including the Pringsheims, Katia’s parents.
Soon the Manns have left France and moved back to
Switzerland, where Elisabeth and Michael can attend German-speaking schools.
Meanwhile, Erika announces to her parents that “she has decided to strike out
on her own and look for a foreign husband.” With the help of Christopher
Isherwood, who has declined her offer of marriage, she makes the acquaintance
of Isherwood’s friend and fellow homosexual, W.H. Auden, the famous British-American
poet. Soon they have made a marriage of convenience and Erika is eligible for
British citizenship.
In the spring of 1935 TM and Albert Einstein are awarded
honorary degrees at Harvard, and the
Manns (Katia and TM), travel to the U.S., where they are welcomed as
celebrities; they are even invited to the White House, to meet FDR and the
First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. As usual, TM expresses his political views with
great reserve, and this seems to have impressed the President. Thomas Mann is
now widely considered the most important and influential German writer and
intellectual in the world.
Back in Switzerland, TM continues working on his long novel
about Joseph in the Old Testament. Throughout his years of exile, the great
writer really wants nothing other than being allowed to continue writing
fiction, but the world of politics continues prodding him in the ribs. He
learns that people—anarchists, communists, Jews—are being detained in German
concentration camps. Erich Mühsam has died after being subjected to
lengthy horrendous torture. Fearful that he could be abducted in Switzerland
and returned to face horrible depredations in Germany, TM decides to emigrate
to the U.S.
America
By 1938 the peregrinations of the Manns in exile have led
them to Princeton, New Jersey, where they struggle with officious bureaucrats
to get permanent residency status and try to learn English. Some of the
children are with them, others are still in Europe. You often wonder why TM and
Katia wanted to have so many children. You wonder if they ever regretted that
decision, since their children—especially the first two, Erika and Klaus—create
so much personal mayhem in their lives. On a ride in a car from New York to
Princeton, Tóibín has TM thinking, for a change, good thoughts about one child,
Elisabeth, “the calm, patient watchful one, the one whose intelligence seemed
to be all-embracing.”
But she too, Elisabeth, has unpleasant news for her parents.
She announces that she is about to be married to Giuseppe Borgese, an Italian,
professor of Romance languages in Chicago and a leading antifascist. He is 56,
she is 20. TM himself is now sixty-three years old. Erika and Klaus are in
their thirties, “two former wunderkinder” and bohemians whose time
appears to have passed, living in a new country, the U.S., where no one has
much use for them. Brother Heinrich will also end up in America, a country to
which he never fully adjusts and has little affection for.
In a comic scene Tóibín describes the visit to the Manns in
Princeton of Erika’s legal husband, W.H. Auden, along with his buddy
Christopher Isherwood. If you had read only this book and knew nothing else
about these two you would conclude that they were little more than simpering fools.
In the Mann household they make asses of themselves, in that snide, sneering
way that gay-guy intellectuals sometimes enjoy acting. They put on a show of
chirpy insolence, acting as if everything and everyone were to be mocked, and
what great fun it is to do the mocking. Thomas Mann is, to put it mildly, not
entertained by their performance in his household.
In the Mann family the impudent Isherwood is known as “the
pimp,” since he is the one who “pimped” Erika to his friend Auden, resulting in
this marriage of convenience. Then again, other famous people sometimes show up
briefly in Tóibín’s book not at their best behavior. Albert Einstein, fellow
denizen of Princeton, is portrayed doing nothing but flirting with Katia Mann.
In 1939, with war on the horizon, TM and Katia are on a trip
to Holland and Sweden, where he is giving lectures and interviews. Tóibín
describes a tense situation in which they are almost trapped in Sweden when the
war breaks out. In desperate straits for a time, they manage to book passage on
a plane for England, but the flight involves a brief passage over Germany. True
to form, TM spends his time throughout this excruciating ordeal working on his
book about Goethe.
Back in Princeton the Manns make efforts to get all of their
children safely out of Europe. As Monika is on her way to the U.S. her ship is
torpedoed. She survives, but her Hungarian husband is drowned. Golo (now 31
years old) and wife, along with brother Heinrich and his underclass wife Nelly,
also arrive in New York by boat. On the same ship is the prima donna wife of
Gustav Mahler, Alma Mahler, another formidable German woman (battleaxe)—this
book is full of them. Tóibín seems to enjoy showing Alma in all her meddlesome,
officious glory, not only in New Jersey, but later, when she and the Manns are
resident in California. Alma Mahler is arrogant, overbearing, brazenly
inconsiderate of others, including her own husbands.
By 1941, along with a large number of German exiles abroad,
the Manns have moved to the west coast, where they take up residence in Los
Angeles. They have a house built for them in Pacific Palisades, where they live
out the years of the war. Having survived the atrocious fires of January, 2025,
that house is now a museum. The war gives Erika new life. She lives in London,
helps out the British with the war effort and works as a foreign correspondent.
Meanwhile, her brother Klaus—former partner in her wild escapades—has gone
rapidly downhill. Living in New York, he indulges himself in homosexual
behavior with unsavory types; he has become a morphine addict.
While visiting Los Angeles Erika has an affair with the
conductor and composer Bruno Walter, a married man only a year younger than her
father. TM is surprised, believing that Erika has always preferred women as
lovers. Klaus and Erika, neither of whom has legal residency status in the
U.S., do not endear themselves to government authorities, who dislike their
leftwing politics and suspect that they are twins who have committed incest,
mixing them up with characters in their father’s fiction. Golo, meanwhile, is
in love with a librarian (male) whom he met in Princeton. When she hears the
latest news of her children’s personal lives, matriarch of the Mann brood,
Katia, often finds herself with no recourse but to laugh. Personal troubles in
California extend to Heinrich and his wife Nelly, the former barmaid. Heinrich
has found no way to support himself in the U.S., has run out of money and must
ask his brother for help. In December, 1944, unable to adapt to her new life in
the U.S., Nelly is to commit suicide—one more of the many incidences of suicide
in Thomas Mann’s life.
The book is full of scenes describing TM’s thoughts as he
listens to the classical music that he loves. Late in life he listens to his
son Michael, viola player, performing chamber music in a quartet. While
listening, he contemplates writing a book about a composer who, like Faust,
forms a pact with the devil. He ponders over what the music that led to the
German catastrophe would sound like. “What happened in Germany would need a
music not only somber but slippery and ambiguous, with a parody of seriousness,
alert to the idea that it was not only desire for territory or riches that gave
rise to this mockery of culture that was Germany now. It was the very culture
itself, he thought, the actual culture that had formed him and people like him,
that contained the seeds of its own destruction. The culture had proved
defenseless and useless against pressure. And the music, the romantic music, in
all the heightened emotion it unleashed, had helped to nourish a raw
mindlessness that had now become brutality.” German culture, its loftiness, its
sensuality, and its ultimate degradation, could be viewed as the overriding
theme of all of Mann’s fiction, and of his personal life.
During the war Katia’s parents, the Pringsheims, finally
escape from Germany into Switzerland—avoiding the concentration camps and
deaths of so many other Jews—but they have been robbed of their magnificent
Munich mansion and all their wealth. They owe their lives to Hitler-loving Winifred
Wagner, who appreciates their veneration of the composer and their patronage at
Bayreuth. Meanwhile, incendiary bombs have been dropped on the city of Lübeck,
destroying the cathedral and the old Mann family home. Klaus Mann argues that
these allied bombings of civilians and mass destruction of German cities is
barbaric, “fighting the war like Nazis,” but TM answers, “The people of Lübeck
have been among the most devout Nazis.”
The Manns again are invited to the White House. The
Roosevelts, apparently, have high hopes that TM will return to Germany after
the war is won, even that he may enter politics and take control of a postwar
Germany. But TM has no desire to be a politician, and, at a dinner attended by
State Department officials in DC, Katia declares her disgust with the German
people. “They are supporting the Nazis. They oversee the cruelty. It is not
simply that there is a group of barbarians at the top. The whole country, and
Austria too, is barbarous. And the barbarity is not new. The anti-Semitism is
not new. It is a part of Germany.” When asked if the Manns will return to
Germany after the war she replies, “The war will never be over for us. We will
never live in Germany again . . . The thought that I ever might have been
German fills me with shame.”
Still living in Pacific Palisades, TM is working on his book
about Goethe and Faust, the story of a composer living in the 1920s, a man who
has signed a pact with dark forces. In his mind he bases the figure of the
composer partly on Arnold Schoenberg, a fellow exile living in California. When
the novel, Dr. Faustus, is published in 1945 he makes the mistake of
sending Schoenberg a copy with an inscription. This results in what could have
been a major scandal. Since the composer in the novel has syphilis, Schoenberg,
assuming that he is the prototype, is offended. Gossiping outrageously, circulating
amidst the community of German exiles in Los Angeles, Alma Mahler fans the
flames of this dispute. For a time TM is worried that Schoenberg will sue him
and his American publisher, demanding a share of the royalties and damages for
libel.
Postwar Life
What influence TM had in Washington is diminished after
Roosevelt’s death in April, 1945. In a lecture, “Germany and the Germans,”
which he plans to deliver at the Library of Congress in DC, Thomas delves
deeply into the German past. He argues that “the German language and German
culture contained the seeds of the Nazis, but they also contained the seeds of
a new democracy that could be brought into being now, a fully German democracy.”
For his example “he turned to Martin Luther as an incarnation of the German
spirit, an exponent of freedom who was also a set of opposites in which each
element contained its own undoing.”
Elements have this way of containing their undoing. What
goes around comes back around, and when it gets back around it quite often is
something altogether different. So goes human life on earth. Had TM lived to
the present time one wonders what he would think of political developments in
today’s Germany, where the rightwing populist party Alternative for Deutschland
has become ever more ascendant. This party promotes the idea that it is time
for Germans to drop the shame foisted upon them after the Hitler fiasco. “The
Holocaust [according to AfD leaders] was a mere speck of bird shit on a
thousand years of glorious German history, and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin
is a monument of shame.” TM might suggest that the seeds of the AfD lie partially
in postwar German democracy, since no citizens of any country will stand for
being forced perpetually to wallow in penitence for past misdeeds.
Tóibín’s book about the life of a famous writer treats also,
to considerable degree, what becomes of the siblings and children of the
writer, and that ancillary tale can be grim. By the time that the Second World
War ends TM’s two sisters are long dead of suicide. Heinrich is living an
almost destitute life in LA, helped out financially by his brother. His wife
Nelly is also dead of suicide, and Heinrich is contrite over the fate of his
first wife Mimi and their daughter Goschi. Living in Prague during the war,
Goschi has nearly starved to death, and Mimi was sent to a concentration camp,
which she barely survived. She lives on, an old and broken woman.
Female War Correspondents in 1944;
Erika Mann is on the Far Right
At least for its duration the war gave new life to the two notorious
Manns, Erika and Klaus, pushing their early forties now. When the war ends they
are both in Germany, she as war correspondent and he as a member of the U.S.
army and journalist for Stars and Stripes. By 1948 Erika, who had worked
for the BBC during the war and had given lectures on Germany, is back living
with her parents in Los Angeles, having nowhere else to go and nothing to do.
Late in the life of Thomas Mann she becomes his personal secretary, handling
his correspondence and even his diary.
While in Germany Klaus had interviewed for Stars and
Stripes famous Austro-Hungarian and German composers, Franz Lehár
and Richard Strauss, “neither of whom suffered from any guilt about having
lived comfortably in Germany as the war went on.” He also interviewed “an
unrepentant Winifred Wagner,” who “spoke about Hitler’s Austrian charm, his
generosity and his marvelous sense of humour.” Back in his homeland, Klaus
found out what had happened to his former leftwing friends; many had been
tortured, others murdered. Wherever he went he felt clearly how his German life
was now utterly finished, that he would never be able to live in Germany again.
In New York, Monika is living an erratic existence, “evicted
from several hotels for not paying her bills.” Klaus also returns to New York,
where he reverts to his dissolute homosexual life and morphine addiction. A
broken, haggard man, he depends on his parents for money, visiting them in LA
and bringing havoc into their lives. He consorts with a disreputable lover,
Harold, who soon is in trouble with the police. At one point Klaus cuts his
wrists in a haphazard attempt at suicide and ends up in the Santa Monica
Hospital.
Elisabeth comes for a visit to LA with her two daughters.
She is vehement now in her hatred for Germany. One evening she begins asking
her mother a series of personal questions, written out. One of them (pointing
casually at her father) is “Why did you marry him?” Speaking “as though she had
prepared her reply,” Katia answers immediately, “Of all the possibilities,
present, past and future, your father was the least preposterous.” She goes on
to add, “My father was a philanderer. He could not stop himself. He wanted any
woman he saw. I have not had that problem with your father.” A direct hint here
that Katia was aware of TM’s latent homosexuality even before she married him.
Tonio Kröger
and The Inner Life of a Literary Artist
Other intimations about what kind of person TM was, what
ideas governed his life and the ways he decided to live it, can be found in his
fictional works. One of the best examples is the story “Tonio Kröger”
(1903). This tale features the making of a literary artist, modelled obviously
on TM himself. It begins with Tonio, a boy who is a blend of a staid Lübeck
father and a vivacious mother, the fiery Consuelo. The prototypes here are
Mann’s parents. Even as a boy Tonio feels insecure in his own skin; he’s a dreamy
writer of poetry who wishes he could be like the normal Hans (first schoolboy
love) and the normal Ingeborg (second schoolboy love). The main theme: “he was
alone; the regular and usual would none of him.”
The story treats in some depth what an artist of the word
is, and how he makes his art. “He worked, not like a man who works that he may
live; but as one who is bent on doing nothing but work; having no regard for
himself as a human being but only as a creator; moving about gray and
unobtrusive among his fellows like an actor without his make-up, who counts for
nothing as soon as he stops representing something else. He worked withdrawn
out of sight and sound of the small fry, for whom he felt nothing but contempt,
because to them a talent was a social asset like any other; who, whether they
were poor or not, went about ostentatiously shabby or else flaunted startling
cravats, all the time taking jolly good care to amuse themselves, to be
artistic and charming without the smallest notion of the fact that good work
comes only out under pressure of a bad life; that he who lives does not work;
that one must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.”
Something of the artist’s utter and total devotion to his
creation is expressed in other works, such as Death in Venice, but there
may not be a better fictional work in Mann’s oeuvre than “Tonio Kröger”
to express his artistic credo. Again and again he emphasizes what it is like to
be him. “For so it is that . . . only the irritations and icy ecstasies of the
artist’s corrupted nervous system are artistic. The artist must be unhuman,
extra-human; he must stand in a queer aloof relationship to our humanity; only
so he is in a position, I ought to say only so would he be tempted, to
represent it, to present it, to portray it to good effect. The very gift of
style, of form and expression, is nothing else than this cool and fastidious
attitude towards humanity; you might say there has to be this impoverishment
and devastation as a preliminary condition.”
This cri de coeur of the literary artist goes on for
several pages. Here’s a bit more of it: “It begins by your feeling yourself set
apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people; there is a
gulf of ironic sensibility, of knowledge, skepticism, disagreement between you
and the others; it grows deeper and deeper; you realize that you are alone . .
. You can disguise yourself, you can dress up like an attaché
or a lieutenant of the guard on leave; you hardly need to give a glance or
speak a word before everyone knows you are not a human being, but something
else; something queer, different, inimical.”
Not to disparage Colm Tóibín’s book, which is a tour de
force in many ways, but this one early story, “Tonio Kröger,” reveals more about the
inner man that TM was than anything in all five hundred pages of the Tóibín
novel. It reveals his view that the true artist is always a sick creature: “a
properly constituted, healthy decent man never writes, acts, or composes.” It
reveals his view that the artist is the perpetual outsider, always apart from
“nice regular people,” always feeling in opposition to them; and certainly in
regard to Tonio—and to Thomas Mann himself—always wishing, at least halfway,
that he could be, like them, “normal.”
The Russian painter to whom Tonio delivers his long rant on
the fate of the true artist responds by calling him “a bourgeois on the wrong
path, a bourgeois manqué,” upon which Tonio’s response is
to pick up his hat and cane and leave, declaring, “Thank you; now I can go home
in peace; I am expressed.” So there we have it. Tonio is an artist who wants to
épater la bourgeoisie and, simultaneously, wishes to be very much a member of the
bourgeoisie. And that was what Thomas Mann himself was all his life, the staid
and conservative paterfamilias, hiding in the closet his pedophilia, living his
bourgeois life in his fancy houses, disdaining the world of politics that
perpetually tormented him, while writing incendiary prose, shocking creative fiction
such as some of what I’ve discussed above.
Final Years
When WW II came to an end the Manns (husband and wife) were
already U.S. citizens, living comfortably (more or less) in their beautiful
California home. But here is one overriding motif in all of TM’s life:
discomfort, in one way or another, always intruded into his comfortable
bourgeois life. Increasingly, in the late forties and the fifties, the
discomfort came at the hands of the F.B.I. and the Red Scare (the MacCarthy
fiasco) in the U.S. Although the politics of TM were always pro-American and
conservative enough, his relatives—especially brother Heinrich and children
Erika and Klaus—were known left-wing sympathizers. Then there were those, in
the U.S. and even in Germany itself, who declared that Thomas Mann, as the most
renowned German intellectual alive, had a moral obligation to return to the Heimat
and lend his energies to creating a new democracy there. But by this time the
Manns (both parents and children) had been exiles so long that the word
“homeland” only made for confusion in their minds. There’s a telling scene in
the new film “Fatherland” by Pawel Pawlikowski, in which Erika says to her
father on their European lecture tour in 1949, “Let’s go home, Papa,” and TM
replies, “Yes, and where is that?”
As for that lecture tour, one of the weirdest episodes in
all of TM’s life, he undertook it on the occasion of the anniversary of
Goethe’s birth. There were stops all around the world, including London,
Switzerland, Stockholm, and, finally, West and East Germany (that’s the
weirdness part). There’s was much discussion in the family about whether TM and
Katia would/should go back to Germany, and there were strenuous efforts on the
part of the U.S. government to keep them out of East Germany.
While staying at a hotel in Stockholm they got the bad news.
Errant son Klaus, who for some reason had decided to move to France, killed
himself there with an overdose of pills. One more suicide in the Mann family,
which by that time had a long history of suicides. The three of them, Thomas,
Katia and Erika had to decide what to do next, and for some time they were
paralyzed with indecision. Katia—of all her children Klaus had always been her
favorite—could not bring herself to face the funeral in France. They waited in
Stockholm. Maybe they should cancel the lecture tour and go back to California.
They waited.
Finally, the three of them decided not to go to France for
the funeral. Michael, who was in France with his orchestra, made all the
arrangements, attended the funeral, then sent to his father a long letter
reeking in petulance. “I am sure the world is grateful to you for the undivided
attention you have given to your books, but we, your children, do not feel any
gratitude to you, or indeed to our mother, who sat by your side. It is hard to
credit that you both stayed in your luxury hotel while my brother was being
buried. I told no one in Cannes that you were in Europe. They would not have
believed me.”
Erika could not bring herself to enter Germany again, but TM
and Katia decided to go on with the lecture tour there. As their driver and
guide in Switzerland, and later Germany, told them, this would be an all-lose
situation: “What you must realize is that you cannot win. If you remain in
California, they will hate you. But if you return, they will hate you for
having been in California in the first place. If you visit only cities in the
West, they will call you an American stooge. But if you visit the East, they
will call you a fellow traveler. And everyone will want you to visit some
shrine, some prison, some site where an atrocity happened. No one will be
pleased except you, and you will be pleased only because, within a short time,
you will be able to return to California.” And so it went, the return visit to
both West and East, to once what had been Heimat. They returned,
briefly, to the wreckage of what once was Munich, but they skipped going to Lübeck.
Despite the objections of the U.S. government, they visited East Germany as
well, now occupied by Russian troops. They were bound for Goethe’s homeland,
Weimar, which now was associated largely with the Buchenwald concentration
camp. Similarly, Wagner country, Bayreuth, in Bavaria, was now associated
mostly with Hitler and his love of Wagner’s music.
They went to East Germany, to Goethe’s Vaterland, where
the Russians feted them; they journeyed about West Germany, for more official
greetings. They felt pleased and comforted by nothing they saw, by nowhere they
were welcomed. They had no desire ever to return to Germany again. In
Pawlikowski’s recent film he changes around the facts a bit. He has Erika,
rather than Katia, accompanying her father on the homeland trip in 1949, thereby
giving short shrift to the character who is—at least in Tóibín’s book—the most
fascinating and intelligent of them all: the irrepressible Katia Mann.
Conclusion
Back to California, their home away from home, where, in
1950, leftwing, anti-American Heinrich is in his late seventies now, still
surviving hand to mouth. Brother Victor has died the year before, and so has Heinrich’s
ex-wife Mimi in Prague, never having recovered from her incarceration in the
Terezin concentration camp. Much to his brother’s discomfort, Heinrich is glorified
by the Communist regime in East Germany. His works are widely published, and he
is invited to return and live there, in East Berlin. He decides to go back, but
before he can arrange for his departure Heinrich dies of a brain hemorrhage in
Santa Monica.
Not an American citizen, as are her parents, Erika is
harassed several times by the F.B.I., suspected of being a Communist. The
authorities in the puritan U.S.A. have never been comfortable with her stance
as openly lesbian. Given the leftish political leanings of his eldest daughter,
late son and brother, TM himself is caught up in the Red Scare of the fifties.
In writing a letter to a friend who had returned to live in Germany, TM “stated
that he had no desire to rest his bones in this soulless soil of America to
which he owed nothing and which knew nothing of him, and he did not mind when
this letter was shown to a German newspaper. It was the truth. He smiled at the
idea that it had taken him seven and a half decades on earth before he could
freely speak the truth.”
He and Katia, along with Erika, decide to move back to
Europe, to Switzerland. Since Golo makes the decision not to live in America as
well, only Elisabeth and Michael will be left in this country. When they
reached Switzerland the long peripatetic, wandering years of Katia and Thomas
finally came to an end. TM lived to age eighty near Zürich, and managed one more
trip back to his home town of Lübeck, where no one he had known there
was left alive.
d
Tóibín’s book features a plethora of famous people who show
up in cameo roles on the pages of this biographical novel, many of whom have
merited biographies of their own. Among them are Franklin D. Roosevelt and
Eleanor Roosevelt, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Albert Einstein, Bertolt
Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, Gustav Mahler, Alma Mahler, Gustaf Gründgens,
Dieterich Buxtehude, Bruno Walter, Winifred Wagner and many others.
Although the book treats most prominently Thomas Mann, and
his ever fascinating but enigmatic wife Katia, it also may be the best novel
ever written about what happens, and how it happens, to children who have the
fortune/misfortune of being born into a household of the rich and famous.
Katia Mann, 1905
