The Bitter Taste of Victory (55 page)

The rupture with Bruno Walter did not bring Erika any closer to Klaus, whose brief return to California in December distressed her. Klaus himself now put on a front of false jollity when he wrote to the woman he could no longer see as a twin spirit. ‘I AM good, and do not even let the thought of a new crisis enter my brain,’ he claimed in a letter to Erika and Katia, shortly before recording in his diary that he was ‘thinking of death; craving it, waiting, hoping for it – every hour of the long, tedious day’. He tried to form an alliance with Erika by protesting manically on her behalf against
Echo der Woche
and even beginning proceedings to sue the journalist. But this could do little to protect him from isolation and despair. He spent the spring of 1949 wandering rootlessly around Europe, taking drugs and writing a novel entitled
The Last Day
and an essay on ‘The Ordeal of the European Intellectuals’, both describing the plight of intelligent Europeans in the Cold War world.
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If completed,
The Last Day
would have joined
Doctor Faustus
as another ambitious, ambivalent and ultimately tragic novel in the genre of ‘outsider rubble literature’. It is essentially an investigation into whether German despair is inevitably world despair; whether German
guilt is a universal human condition and whether suicide is the only possible response. In its simplest form, the novel contrasts the experiences of an ‘inner’ and an ‘outer’ emigrant, alternating the point of view of two German writers in East Berlin and New York who resent the domineering intellectual control imposed by the Soviet Union and the US respectively. Albert is a Becher-inspired cultural official in East Germany who is too idealistic for the new Soviet-controlled Germany. Julian is a German exile living in New York who can never forget that he shares the guilt of his race and who feels disillusioned by Truman’s America. An American official called Colonel McKinsey plays a fateful part in the lives of both men. In Berlin, he offers Albert the chance to defect to West Germany ‘without any obligations’; in New York, he writes to Julian, denouncing him as a communist. Alienated by the prevailing anti-communism, Julian realises that bureaucrats like the colonel no longer want peace, but are leading the country to war. ‘They talk about Freedom and Democracy – employing those lofty terms as baits to attract, to confuse, to fool the masses.’
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Julian wonders about publishing a manifesto in a communist newspaper but he is aware that he is no more comfortable with communism than he is with American capitalism. He goes to visit a British poet, modelled on Auden (‘at once capricious and didactic’ with pedantic gestures, a soft, absent-minded smile, carpet slippers and close-bitten fingernails) who fails to provide any answers, telling Julian that the solution to desperation lies in the Catholic Church. Julian suggests that despair itself can be a form of protest and decides to commit suicide. The novel ends with the deaths of both men. Albert, about to escape to the West, is betrayed by his wife and arrested by Russian officers who shoot him when he tries to escape (‘dirt and blood. A messy agony’) while Julian kills himself, attempting to slash his wrists in the bath tub and then jumping naked from the window.
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The scenes Klaus Mann sketched in the most detail are those depicting Julian’s decline. Julian is enthused by the ‘sudden certainty’ that he wants to die, which moves him ‘like a wave of joy, a triumph’, making him feel strong. Absolute despair seems to him to have tremendous power – ‘a dynamic impact’. It can be made into ‘an argument of
irresistible persuasiveness’ because ‘a man who has given up hope becomes invincible’. He thinks about founding a ‘League of the Desperate Ones’, a ‘Suicide Club’. Other members already include ‘the Austrian humanist who took his life in Brazil’ (Stefan Zweig) and ‘the English novelist and
femme de lettres
who drowned herself’ (Virginia Woolf). His death will be a form of protest motivating the intellectual elite all over the world to join his organisation. Immediately, Julian worries that these ‘political’ motives for suicide may be an artificial ‘rationalisation’ when in fact the will to death is ‘primary, elementary’. But then he decides that it is reasonable to ‘turn one’s delusions into something constructive’; to sublimate the death instinct. ‘I die in an exemplary manner: my death is a signal, a challenge, an appeal.’
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In Julian’s death, Klaus relived in gruesome, almost comical detail the horrors of his own suicide attempt in LA. Julian drinks whiskey and clambers naked into the bath. Here he surveys his body, patting his chest, stomach and genitals, and thinks that he has not made enough use of it all. He then starts cutting his wrists with the razor blade and finds that ‘the taste of death is bitter . . . my purple bath, my blood bath’. The water reddens as he tries his right wrist and then, more successfully, his left. But the vein contracts and the blood stops. He climbs out of the bathtub and rushes through the room, dripping with blood and water as he fumbles to open the window.
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Klaus told a friend that he was confronting ‘the issue of suicide’ in his novel because it was ‘more tedious and more painful but somehow more honourable than actually doing it’. During the war, writing about his own death-wish in his autobiography had proved a way for Klaus to protect himself from giving way to despair. Now writing was no longer enough, not least because the despair impeded the novel. ‘Not writing, but struggling’ is a typical diary entry describing his progress with the book. His motivation was even lower than usual because his chances of publication seemed to be narrowing. He had just heard that the West Germans were not prepared to republish
Mephisto
as it was so obviously a satirical portrait of Gustaf Gründgens and ‘Mr Gründgens plays a very important role here’. It was harder to devote energy to writing a new book when the world had lost interest in his existing work.
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He spent April writing in Cannes where the unusually bleak and rainy weather contributed to his gloom. ‘Rain . . . the weather being about as miserable as my moral and physical state,’ he wrote in his diary on 3 May. He still tried to remain light-hearted about his difficulties in letters to his sister, informing Erika cheerfully that he was quitting drugs and planned to send her the remainder of his stock of morphine, though she should take the ‘utmost precaution’ as it was soporific stuff: ‘do not slurp it before social events, only before bedtime in small doses’. But two days later he checked himself into a sanatorium in Nice for detoxification. While Thomas, Erika and Katia were crossing the ocean, Klaus was undergoing a period of tearful insomnia as he attempted to wrest himself free from the drugs that now enabled his only moments of happiness.
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On 14 May, Klaus emerged from the sanatorium into the bright sunshine of springtime Nice and wrote to his mother and sister in London that he had been reborn as a ‘nearly recovered, and nearly completely healthy boy’. He was working again; he had heard that his ‘Ordeal of the European Intellectuals’ piece was going to be published by
Tomorrow
in June; ‘the dreadful diarrhoea still ails me and sleep is scarce, but who would complain about such bagatelles?’ Klaus had learnt (from a friend rather than from his father) about Thomas Mann’s impending visit to Germany and he tried to sound supportive. The trip would coincide with the foundation of the West German state (elections had been planned for mid-August) so he suggested that West Germany would do well to offer the presidency to Mann. ‘The poet’s destiny would be complete, it would be a fat punch line for the biographers.’ Mann was the ideal choice as he was accepted in both zones, celebrated in the West and politely acknowledged by the East. And Klaus would enjoy imposing family politics on the nation: ‘I’d make sure only homosexuals are given power; the sale of healing morphine would be legalised; E will reside as the grey eminence in Bad Godesberg while father is drinking Rhine wine with the Russian deputy in Bonn.’
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But within two days the rain had returned and Klaus was injecting himself with drugs once more, though he described it in his diary as ‘a
minor relapse’. That evening Thomas Mann gave a lecture in the Jewish Wiener Library in London about the need to remember the Nazi period. The Germans had a tendency to forget and to suppress the twelve years of National Socialism. To remember the crimes of those twelve years had come to seem tactless and unpatriotic. ‘But the Germans should remember, and from this memory they should create the drive to make good again that which they did wrong.’ Klaus would have been pleased with this message if he could have heard it, but his father was out of contact and even Erika sent only briskly patronising missives, making no plans to visit her brother in Cannes. ‘If one takes sleeping pills constantly, how is one going to sleep?’ she asked him on the day of her father’s lecture. ‘And now, of course, you are reduced and miserable and if your writing does not work right away you tell yourself that it never will and you become even more depressed.’
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On 20 May 1949 Klaus assured Katia and Erika that he was ‘doing well’ and was about to return to his novel. The rain in Cannes had given way to hail and thunder, but he was optimistic and hoped to meet Erika in Austria later in the summer. He sent ‘all love, truthfulness, beauty’ to his parents and sister from ‘lovely, truthful, beautiful Klaus’. Soon after midnight he set about killing himself with an overdose of sleeping tablets. The cleaning staff in the hotel found him unconscious in his room with the names of his sister and mother scribbled on a piece of paper. He was rushed to hospital but within a few hours he was dead. A friend visiting him shortly afterwards told his family that she was struck by the child-like expression of fulfilled desire on his face. At last he had taken flight in the winged cradle of his dreams.
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Erika, Thomas and Katia Mann received the news of Klaus’s death in Stockholm. Thomas described in his diary an evening spent united in grief, talking about Klaus’s irresistible compulsion for death. At this stage Thomas’s pain was comprised more of sympathy for his wife and daughter than of sadness for the loss of his son. ‘My concern and compassion are with the heart of his mother and with E. He should not
have done this to them . . . The injury: unpleasant, cruel, reckless and irresponsible.’

They wondered about breaking off their journey but decided that Thomas should continue with his lectures and that they would just cancel the social events. ‘It seemed more right after all for Tommy to complete the lecture tour,’ Katia reported to Heinrich Mann, telling her brother-in-law that Klaus’s longing for death was evidently insurmountable: ‘it was going to be fulfilled sometime’.
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Over the next few ‘veiled’ days, Thomas donned mourning attire and lectured in packed auditoriums and Erika cried in the hotel. ‘These are sad days,’ Thomas told Heinrich, describing how the audience at his lecture had risen silently from their seats as they made their entrance. His grief was still more on Erika’s behalf than his own: ‘it pains me so to see Erika always in tears. She is abandoned, has lost her companion, whom she always tried to keep clutched to her side. It is hard to understand how he could do this to her. How deranged he must have been in that moment! But it had long been probably his deepest longing, and his face in death is supposed to have worn the expression of a child having his wish fulfilled.’
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As always, both Thomas and Erika experienced the emotional turbulence physically. Erika had flu and Thomas suffered from stomach troubles and weak intestines. She travelled alone to Amsterdam before rejoining her parents in Zurich, where they met the rest of the family, including Frido, whose poetry recitations and magic tricks provided brief consolation for Thomas. Erika remained tearful, especially when Klaus’s suitcase, typewriter and coats arrived from Cannes. Thomas had now resolved to abbreviate his stay in Europe and the family was trying to decide whether he should still visit Germany (the authorities in Frankfurt had offered to bring the ceremony forward to July). He now agreed to go to Frankfurt and even began to consider visiting Weimar, as East Germany had offered him their Goethe prize too, as well as awarding Heinrich Mann their inaugural German National Prize for Art and Literature and inviting him to return to East Berlin as president of the German Academy of Arts. Erika remained opposed to her father’s return to Germany so their estrangement deepened. He told
her that she was being unreasonable and that Klaus would not have been so inflexible. ‘That’s why he killed himself,’ she replied, ‘which is what I now
won’t
do. That’s some consolation, but not much.’
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