New Ways to Kill Your Mother

open, with Klaus’s former lover and brother-in-law, Gustaf Grundgens, and his rise to power as an actor in Nazi Germany. Although it has its dramatic moments, some of it is very badly written. The narrative regularly gets carried away in its efforts to portray the Nazis as pure evil and the actor Hendrik Hofgen as ambitious, flawed, sexually perverse, a man ready to sell his soul while tempting others to do the same.

Some of the writing, in its flatness and exaggeration, would have made Thomas Mann wince. But one section of the book must have hurt him more than any number of threatening letters from Erika. Klaus, it seems to me, managed to include aspects of his father in the character of Hofgen. This is something that Mann in his diaries and his letters, as published in English, makes no mention of, and I can find no reference to it in the many biographies of Mann. Nonetheless, it seems clear that Klaus used a small part of his father in his attempt to dramatize political treachery for the sake of artistic success.

In Mephisto, Hendrik marries Barbara Bruckner, a version of Erika, whose father is also a version of Thomas Mann. Hendrik’s new father-in-law was ‘a scholar and thinker who was not only one of the most eminent and talked about figures on the European literary scene but also one of the most influential in political circles’. The actor’s father-in-law is referred to throughout as ‘the privy councillor’, or the ‘Geheimrat’, a term used in the Mann family to describe not Thomas Mann, but Mann’s own father-in-law, Alfred Pringsheim.

When Thomas Mann, an awkward, ambitious young man from the Baltic, married Katia Pringsheim, he was no less intimidated by the cultural sophistication and general social confidence of Katia’s family than Hendrik Hofgen was by the family of Barbara Bruckner in Mephisto. (Golo remembers his father saying of Katia’s family: ‘They have never liked me, nor I them.’) In some passages, the novel seems to be merging the relationship between the provincial actor Grundgens and the Manns with the relationship between Thomas Mann and the Pringsheims. In that sense Thomas Mann appears hidden in the character of Hofgen, both of them marrying above their station, both later selling their soul, or refusing to speak out, for the sake of continued or greater fame as artists. Klaus, who wasn’t generally given to subtlety, is subtle about this particular trick, but it wouldn’t have escaped the attention of the old magician that his son, by using the word ‘Geheimrat’ so often to describe Hofgen’s father-in-law, was comparing his father to an artist who had famously sold his soul. Seven years later, Mann would begin his own book on the same subject, the magisterial Doctor Faustus.

In September 1936, Erika and Klaus moved from Europe to the United States, where Erika began an affair with a German doctor who was staying at her hotel. According to Sybille Bedford, she ‘went off women, she really became interested in men, she went off with people’s husbands even’. Klaus had an affair with an American dancer. The Peppermill was to be performed in New York with its European cast. Although the lyrics had been translated into English, some by Auden, the show was a disaster and soon taken off.

Very quickly Erika learned enough English to begin giving lectures all over the US. When Klaus’s visa ran out he returned to Europe, staying with his parents in Switzerland, amazed to find that, without consulting him, his father had founded his own bimonthly journal for German emigres and appointed an editor. Klaus wrote in his diary: ‘I perceive, again, very strongly and not without bitterness, Z.’s complete coldness to me… His universal lack of interest in people is here especially intensified.’ It’s clear from Erika’s letters that Klaus was taking a great deal of heroin.

In March 1937 the entire Mann family, including Heinrich, was granted Czechoslovak citizenship. Klaus could now travel to Budapest to seek treatment for his heroin addiction, treatment which did not fully work. Six months later he returned to the US and to Erika, who took him with her on what became joint lecture tours. Their titles included ‘What Price Peace?’, ‘What Does the Youth of Europe Believe in Today?’ and ‘Our Father and His Work’. They wrote two books together.

Soon, Thomas and Katia Mann arrived in America as well, and, with their fourteen suitcases in tow, began to tour the country too. When Klaus published a new novel, his father wrote to say that he’d admired it, adding that when he first saw it he ‘secretly had the wicked intention’ of not reading it through but ‘just looking into’ it. Of the letters he received from his father about his work, Klaus noted in his diary: ‘He writes to complete strangers just as pleasantly. A mixture of highest intelligence, almost charitable courtesy — and ice coldness. This is especially accentuated when it concerns me.’ In 1939, Mann published Lotte in Weimar, in which Goethe’s son is introduced as follows: ‘August is his son; and to the father’s mind the boy’s existence exhausted itself in that fact.’ He added: ‘To be the son of a great man is a high fortune, a considerable advantage. But it is likewise an oppressive burden, a permanent derogation of one’s ego.’ The great man settled in Princeton, where he had Bruno Walter and Einstein for neighbours.

In 1938 Klaus and Erika reported on the Spanish Civil War which had broken out in 1936. Erika wrote School for Barbarians, a book on the Nazi education system; it sold 40,000 copies in the US in the first three months after publication. Erika slowly became one of the most successful and highly paid women lecturers in the country. Both she and Klaus believed passionately that America should straightaway enter the war and were appalled by the attitude of Auden and Christopher Isherwood, who had left England and thus avoided active involvement in the war. In his diary, Klaus recognized in Auden ‘the cold charms’ of Gustaf Grundgens, but he refused to be seduced by them. When he saw the menage that Auden had established in Brooklyn with Carson McCullers, Gypsy Rose Lee, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Chester Kallman, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles, among others, he wrote in his diary: ‘What an epic one could write about this!’ Soon Golo too moved in, having escaped from the Nazis by walking over the Pyrenees with his Uncle Heinrich, Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel.

Isherwood, who was in the habit of thinking well of people, thought Klaus ‘without vanity or self- consciousness’; ‘his great charm,’ Isherwood said, ‘lay in this openness, this eager, unaffected approach.’ Others didn’t share his view. Glenway Wescott called Klaus a ‘tragic twerp’; Janet Flanner thought he was pathetically dominated by Erika, who flew to Europe in 1940 to work as a war correspondent for the BBC, leaving Klaus in New York feeling ‘envy and anxiety’ and resenting the fact that his sister had once again left him behind. He would continue to be supported financially by his parents. When a New York editor informed Auden and Kallman that he would soon be publishing Klaus’s autobiography, they fell around laughing and said: ‘What will you call it? The Invisible Man? The Subordinate Klaus?’

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 ‘Andre 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