New Ways to Kill Your Mother (27 page)

Klaus’s autobiography was called
The Turning Point
. It was an exercise in tact. He couldn’t attack his father openly, since he was living off him financially and operating in the US in his father’s shadow, a shadow that was both protective and damaging. In his autobiography he took every opportunity to single out and praise his Uncle Heinrich rather than his father, but was careful not to write about his father in the same wounded tone he used in his diaries. The account in the book of his father hollering from the window on seeing his son leaving home – ‘Good luck, my son! And come home when you are wretched and forlorn’ – reads like pure mythology, or a sad joke. When he wrote to Klaus about the book, Mann told him he had absolutely no memory of ever saying that.

In Klaus’s version of the early years in exile when his father would not denounce the regime, he exalted Heinrich for being ‘the first to receive the enviable distinction’ of getting on Goebbels’s blacklist. His uncle, he wrote, ‘had left Berlin soon after the Reichstag Fire and, once in France, lost no time in raising his voice to
arraign and ridicule the brown canaille … Heinrich Mann – a man in his early sixties at the beginning of his exile – experienced something like a second youth.’ He himself, he wrote, was on Goebbels’s second list and Erika on the third. When he came to write about
Die Sammlung
, he mentioned that it was produced under the sponsorship of ‘André Gide, Heinrich Mann and Aldous Huxley’. There was no mention of his father.

‘As for our father,’ he finally wrote, the Nazis, ‘still afraid of public opinion abroad’, were more ‘reluctant’ to place him on a blacklist: ‘At this point his works were not officially banned; although as far back as 1933, to ask openly for a book by Thomas Mann in a German bookstore was a risky thing to do. For his feelings towards Nazism were generally known, and were emphasised, furthermore, by his refusal to return to Munich.’ When Klaus mentioned ‘the inevitable clash’ between his father and the Nazis, he neglected to say that it didn’t take place until 1936. He described the immense comfort and ease of his father’s early exile in Switzerland without any appearance of irony. By the time the book appeared, Thomas Mann had reinvented himself as the most vocal and serious opponent of the Nazis among the German exiles in the United States. It must have pleased him that Klaus had done nothing to damage his new position. He wrote him a bland and affectionate letter: ‘It is an unusually charming, kind, sensitive, clever and honestly personal book.’ The poet Muriel Rukeyser remembered Klaus frantically waiting for this letter, tearing it open when it came and reading it ‘in a moving, suspended moment of all the mixed feeling that can be found in the autobiography itself’.

In these years Klaus, without Erika, grew increasingly unhappy and went on taking drugs and falling unsuitably in love. The FBI was on his case, having been told that both he and Erika were Communists. ‘When Fascism spread across Europe,’ Weiss writes, ‘the FBI expended considerable time and resources
harassing two of the strongest and most dedicated advocates for liberal democracy, both of whom had great respect for the government of the United States.’ Erika and Klaus were guilty, it seemed, not only of ‘premature’ anti-Fascism but of ‘having affairs together’. It was reported that ‘many queer-looking people’ could be seen going into Klaus’s hotel room in New York, as indeed they could. Klaus remarked in his diary that he liked ‘porters, waiters, liftboys and so on, white or black. Almost all are agreeable to me. I could sleep with all of them.’ Sybille Bedford recalled that what attracted Klaus ‘were the professional louts’.

During this period, Erika grew closer to her father but, as Weiss writes, ‘Klaus’s estrangement from the Magician did not ameliorate with the reconciliation of their political differences; it was always about something deeper. The sacred bond the siblings shared since childhood, forged in resistance to Thomas Mann and all he represented, no longer could sustain itself with the same passionate intensity.’

After Pearl Harbor, Klaus decided to join the US Army. The FBI reported that his first physical examination revealed a ‘syphilitic condition’ and ‘13 arsenical and 39 heavy metal injections’. He was rejected a number of times, partly because of his homosexuality, and then finally accepted in December 1942. When he was posted to the Mediterranean, Erika remarked that for the first time since their childhood he was almost happy. His parents came to see him off. He wrote in his diary: ‘At our farewell, Z. embraced me, something that had never happened before.’

Klaus arrived in Germany the day after the surrender. He had believed that ‘when the Dictator has vanished – and only then, will it again be possible … to live in Germany, without fear and without shame.’ He now knew that wasn’t true. On 16 May 1945, he wrote to his father:

It would be a very grave mistake on your part to return to this country and play any kind of political role here. Not that I believe you were harbouring any projects or aspirations of this kind. But just in case any tempting proposition should ever be made to you … Conditions here are too sad. All your efforts to improve them would be hopelessly wasted. In the end you would be blamed for the country’s well-deserved, inevitable misery. More likely than not, you would be assassinated.

When he revisited the shell of the family home in Munich, Klaus discovered that it had been used as a
Lebensborn
during the war, an Aryan knocking-shop, ‘a place where racially qualified young men and equally well-bred young women collaborated in the interest of the German nation … Many fine babies were begotten and born in this house.’ When he interviewed Richard Strauss for the army magazine
Stars and Stripes
, Strauss praised Hans Frank, who ran Auschwitz, since Frank, unlike Hitler, ‘really appreciated my music’. Klaus met Heinrich’s first wife, who had been released from Terezín, and their daughter, who had also been imprisoned. He didn’t believe that ordinary Germans were ignorant of what happened in the concentration camps. He wrote that he felt ‘a stranger in my former fatherland’.

Erika arrived in Germany four months after Klaus. She wrote: ‘The Germans, as you know, are hopeless. In their hearts, self-deception and dishonesty, arrogance and docility, shrewdness and stupidity are repulsively mingled and combined.’ Bedford said of her: ‘Erika could hate, and she hated the Germans. You see, Erika was a fairly violent character. At one point during the war, she propagated that every German should be castrated. And vengeance – Klaus wasn’t like that at all. Erika was very unforgiving.’

On her arrival in Munich, she registered a claim on the old family house, something that poor impractical Klaus had
neglected to do. Her other task was to report on the Nuremberg Trials. She was the only one of the journalists allowed into the hotel where the Nazi leaders were being held. She let them know who she was. ‘To think that that woman has been in my room,’ Julius Streicher remarked. Goering had something more interesting to say. He explained that ‘had he been in charge of the “Mann case”, he would have handled it differently … Surely a German of the stature of Thomas Mann could have been adapted to the Third Reich.’ Erika reported that ‘when a slight thunderstorm had frightened Göring into an equally slight heart attack, the creator of the Blitz was given a mattress for his cot, and breakfast in bed.’ When she visited Hans Frank and Ribbentrop, ‘the Butcher of Poland was reading the Bible to the ex-champagne salesman’.

Erika and Klaus were increasingly at sea in the new Germany. Klaus began to work in films, collaborating briefly and painfully with Roberto Rossellini. Someone who worked with him in these years said: ‘He was a restless man. He had so many ideas and so much energy … I don’t think he could sit still for two minutes. He had a cigarette perpetually in his mouth and was in constant movement. You could feel the vibrations of his energy.’

It should have been possible for Klaus’s books, especially
Mephisto
and
The Turning Point
, which had been published during his exile, to begin appearing in the new Germany. But the new Germany was strange. Gustaf Gründgens was back on the stage, as popular and successful as he had been when he had Goering to protect him. Weiss reports that having with difficulty secured a ticket for a sold-out performance, Klaus ‘was speechless to discover that Gründgens, stepping onto the stage during the first act, received a show-stopping standing ovation’.

In response he wrote an article suggesting that Emmy Sonnemann, the actress who married Goering, should also have her career revived. ‘Perhaps someone gassed at Auschwitz,’ he wrote, ‘left behind some stage piece in which the esteemed woman
could make her second debut. The good woman surely knew nothing about Auschwitz – and besides, what does art have to do with politics?’ When the German edition of
The Turning Point
appeared in 1952, Gründgens demanded that sections of the book that damaged his reputation be removed. They were.
Mephisto
appeared in German in 1956 but only in the GDR: no West German publisher would touch it, even after Gründgens’s suicide in 1963. Erika brought the case to the West German Supreme Court, which ruled in favour of suppressing the book, preserving Gründgens’s posthumous reputation. After a long wait, a paperback version finally appeared in West Germany in 1981, as well as a film adaptation.

In 1946, as his ex-lover and current nemesis was being applauded on the stage, Klaus decided to return to America for an extended visit. Since he had nowhere else to go, he planned to make his way to Los Angeles, where his parents were installed in a large and splendid house in Pacific Palisades; but his father had been diagnosed with lung cancer and was being operated on in Chicago. Erika flew from Nuremberg to be with her father. She never again left his side. For the next nine years she was Mann’s secretary and chief confidante. Just as she and Klaus had once been inseparable, now she and her father were never apart. Years later, Elisabeth Mann remembered:

She returned home, because she had exhausted her career, and so devoted herself to the work of her father … Erika was a very powerful personality, a very dominant, domineering personality, and I must say that this role that she played in the latter part of her life as manager of my father was not always very easy to take for my mother, because she had been used to doing all of that.

Among other tasks, Erika set about cutting the final manuscript of
Doctor Faustus
by forty pages; her father believed she had improved the book.

Klaus wrote to his mother suggesting that a cottage be found for him near his parents’ home and since he could not drive, he would also need ‘an old Ford and a young driver … The driver must also be able to cook a bit and have a pleasant appearance.’ His mother replied immediately. ‘A house to rent and a car and a driver who can cook, who also was attractive! With a lot of luck, one can get a room from upwards of one hundred dollars … This is democracy!’ Klaus arrived in Los Angeles at the end of July but was back in New York by the early autumn. He was once more in exile, this time from his family as well as his country. He had lost his sister to his father and had used up his mother’s patience. In 1948 he said: ‘It is only the parts of my life in which she [Erika] shares that have substance and reality for me.’

Klaus now moved between New York, Paris, Zurich, Vienna and Amsterdam. When he returned once more to Los Angeles, his parents asked him to leave after a month as other siblings and cousins were coming to stay. Klaus, with Erika’s help, found a place nearby. Six days after moving in, he attempted suicide by slitting his wrists, taking pills and turning on the gas. He was hospitalized and the incident was reported in the press. His father didn’t visit. 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.’ His mother, when she heard the news, is reported (by Elisabeth) to have snapped: ‘If he wanted to kill himself, why didn’t he do it properly?’ Erika wrote to a friend: ‘As you may have read, Klaus – my closest brother – tried to do away with himself which was not only a nasty shock but also involved a great deal of time-devouring trouble.’ On 1 January 1949 Klaus wrote in his diary: ‘I do not wish to survive this year.’ In April, in Cannes, he received a letter from a West German publisher to say that
Mephisto
couldn’t appear ‘because Mr Gründgens plays a
very important role here’. The following month he succeeded in killing himself. He was forty-two.

Mann was in Stockholm with Katia and Erika when he heard the news. ‘My inward sympathy,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘with the mother’s heart and with E. He should not have done this to them … The hurtful, ugly, cruel inconsideration and irresponsibility.’ He wrote to Heinrich: ‘His case is so very strange and painful, such skill, charm, cosmopolitanism, and in his heart a death-wish.’ He wrote to Hermann Hesse: ‘This interrupted life lies heavily on my mind and grieves me. My relationship with him was difficult and not free of guilt. My life put his in a shadow right from the beginning.’ He decided not to attend his son’s funeral or interrupt his lecture tour. Of all the family, only Michael, the youngest sibling, on tour with the San Francisco Symphony, attended the funeral; he played a largo on his viola as the coffin was lowered into the ground.

Later, Elisabeth would say of Erika: ‘When Klaus died, she was totally, totally heartbroken – I mean that was unbearable for her, that loss. That hit her harder than anything else in her life.’ Erika returned with her parents to the US and sought citizenship only to find that she was once more under investigation by the FBI. By 1950 there was even a move to deport her for being a Communist. Before it went any further, she decided to leave, taking her parents with her. They had become close enough for her father to write in his diary about his concern for Erika: ‘she could so easily follow her brother. Certainly she does not want to live any longer than us.’ They sold the house in Pacific Palisades in June 1952 and moved to Switzerland. Thomas Mann died three years later at the age of eighty.