New Ways to Kill Your Mother

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

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

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

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

By the time Hitler came to power in 1933 Thomas Mann, at fifty-eight, was in possession not only of this daring imagination but of the Nobel Prize, which he had received in 1929. He lived in a large and beautiful house in Munich and owned an idyllic summer house on the Baltic that he had built three years earlier — a house subsequently requisitioned by Goering. Mann had a reputation as the most serious-minded and respectable German alive. He enjoyed his fame and his family, his bourgeois comforts and his mornings alone in his study writing essays and fiction. The Manns lived well, their son Golo later wrote, thanks to the Nobel Prize and the tremendous earnings of The Magic Mountain. They took trips, they ate and drank well, and two large cars stood in the garage: an open American car and a German limousine. When they went to the theatre, the chauffeur waited in the lobby with their fur coats at the end of the performance. This style of life, which they went to no trouble to conceal, made their growing number of political enemies hate them all the more.

Thomas Mann was unprepared for exile. In a letter, he wrote: ‘I am too good a German, too closely involved with the cultural traditions and language of my country for the prospect of a yearlong or perhaps life-long exile not to have a hard, ominous meaning for me.’ He was so unprepared that, on leaving the country less than a month after Hitler became chancellor, he failed to take his diaries and the pages of the novel he was working on. Publication of the diaries would have considerably dampened the warm welcome he was to receive in America.

By 1933 Erika and Klaus Mann were famous too. Thomas Mann had not encouraged Klaus to become a writer, noting in his diary that his fourteen-year-old son’s intention to send stories to magazines was ‘a folly from which he must be dissuaded’. As adolescents, Erika and Klaus wrote plays and stories. While still teenagers, they made their way to Berlin, where Erika was determined to become a famous actress and Klaus a famous writer. As soon as he began to publish essays and stories, Klaus traded on his father’s fame with a mixture of brazenness and unease. A cartoon appeared in a satirical magazine showing him in short pants next to his father. The caption read: ‘I am told, Papa, that the son of a genius is never a genius himself. Therefore, you can’t be a genius!’ Bertolt Brecht wrote: ‘The whole world knows Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann. By the way, who is Thomas Mann?’ When The Magic Mountain appeared in 1924, Thomas Mann wrote in his son’s copy: ‘To my respected colleague — his promising father.’ Klaus was foolish enough to show it to a friend and it was quoted regularly in the press. Klaus, as he entered his twenties, was both a wunderkind and a joke.

Thomas Mann, unlike his son, was an immensely complex figure, conservative in his manners and ambiguous in his politics and, for many years, in his German nationalism. He could have been a senator and businessman like his father had it not been for something rich and almost hidden in his nature that set him apart. It was not merely a hidden sexuality, or something inherited from his slightly daft mother, but an imaginative energy and dark daring that, combined with an astonishing steely ambition and solidity, enabled him to produce Buddenbrooks when he was twenty-five.

Klaus was always simpler to read. He was fluid and generous and flighty. He kept nothing in reserve, and this, despite his obvious literary talent, made him melancholy. His father’s deep, almost obsessive interest in death was entertained and kept at bay because Thomas Mann placed it at the service of his work; a sense of doom and disease filled the pages and the spirit of the characters in Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus and many of Mann’s best stories. Mann comes to us a writer of many layers and guises. Much can be read into his work, and it is easy to understand the interest of scholars in finding a key to his peculiar artistic systems and to hidden aspects of his life. He had to be careful, once he arrived in the United States, about his sexuality and his shifting relationship with aspects of Germany that, after 1933, had become deeply unsavoury and shameful. In Bluebeard’s Chamber: Guilt and Confession in Thomas Mann (2003), Michael Maar argued, however, that Mann was, for much of his life, especially with his family, his friends, and in his work, unusually open about his sexuality.

Instead, searching for secret elements in his fiction, Maar insisted that one theme impelled and nourished Mann’s imagination more than any other. He found image after image from the beginning to the end of his work of murder, blood, knives and sexual pleasure. He suggested that this was the key to Mann’s work and perhaps to his life. ‘We can venture,’ he wrote, ‘the thought experiment that if Thomas Mann had committed an actual crime and sought to give an account of it in his fiction, the work would not have taken a different form than it actually has.’ He suggests — almost convincingly — that in Naples, in the mid-1890s, when he was a very young man, Thomas Mann did something, or witnessed something, or was closely implicated in something that involved sex and murder. And that what he did, or what he witnessed, both maimed and energized him and made its way into what he wrote over sixty years. It hardly matters whether Maar’s hypotheses are true or not. What is more interesting is the way Mann’s work continues to be examined and reread, as though the key to it remains in some furtive, cloaked part of his dark and exotic psychosexual being. ‘It is as well,’ Mann wrote in Death in Venice, ‘that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not its origins.’

Klaus, on the other hand, had no secret crimes, real or imaginary, on his conscience; instead of writing about death as his father did, he allowed the aura of death to enter his own spirit. As early as 1932 he wrote in his diary that he had thought about suicide. In February 1933 he wrote: ‘In the mornings, nothing but the wish to die. When I calculate what I have to lose, it seems negligible. No chance of a really happy relationship. Probably no chance of literary fame in the near future… Death can only be regarded as deliverance.’ What makes Klaus a subject of great fascination in Germany now, however, is not his dance with death but rather that he saw the rise of Fascism more clearly and presciently than his father did and bravely set about opposing it in every way he could while also managing to take drugs and have lots of sex. As the prevaricating father struggled with ambiguities, both political and sexual, he made masterpieces from the fight. The son was a simpler soul, more open about his sexuality, more certain of his beliefs. Out of that he made a few almost interesting books.

At the end of 1924 Klaus Mann wrote Anja and Esther, a play about a neurotic quartet of four boys and girls who were in love with each other. The following year he was approached by the actor Gustaf Grundgens, who wanted to direct the play with himself in one of the male roles, Klaus in the other; Erika Mann and Pamela Wedekind, the daughter of the playwright Frank Wedekind, would be the two young women. The ambitious Grundgens had a reputation in Hamburg but not in Berlin. At one point, as they worked on the play, Klaus