Fast writer, chain smoker, homosexual: Thomas Medicus’ biography of Klaus Mann sketches the author’s life and his contradictions.
The words in the diary leave nothing to be desired in terms of clarity. ‘I will not continue with these notes. ‘I do not want to survive this year’, it says in English. The death wish dates from 1 January 1947. Klaus Mann survived that year, as well as the following year. But in the night of 20 to 21 May 1949 he died by his own hand in Cannes, France. He was 42 years old. A death with an announcement.
Who was Klaus Mann? Just a world-travelling dandy, supported by the wealthy family? Or a serious writer, initially uninterested in politics in search of identities, to later stand uncompromisingly on the side of the persecuted during Hitler’s forced exile? Or was Klaus Mann the first-born son of Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann?
Biographer Thomas Medicus delved deeply into the paper legacy of Klaus Mann. In his search for the man behind the name, he mainly evaluated the diary. He comes to the conclusion that one answer is not enough for the biography of Klaus Mann.
He changed his role too often radically for that. In the late twenties he played the dandy, who attracted political attention only with his strange ideas. There were times when people had nothing against the introduction of a mild dictatorship.
Ambivalences in political attitudes
On the other hand, he later played a leading role in the formation of the Stalinist-led Popular Front against Hitler, but was unable to break with the communists in view of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Mann admired Gottfried Benn, who became a Nazi apologist for a time, and wrote to Gustaf Gründgens in his most famous novel “Mephistopheles” low.
His relationship with his lesbian sister Erika was close for a long time, until she went her own way. In 1944, Mann became a volunteer American soldier who participated in the liberation of Europe. However, he was less conspicuous as a defender of liberal democracy.
And yet, as Thomas Medicus points out, there were three things that ran like a thread through Klaus Mann’s life: his sexual orientation, his proximity to death, and his difficult relationship with his father. Thomas Mann was homosexual, which is easily written about today, but at the time it amounted to an unheard-of social scandal.
Klaus Mann made no secret of his homosexuality from an early age, to the extent that this was even possible at a time when such behavior was punishable by imprisonment. But anyone who could read learned about the author’s sexual orientation in his book “The Pious Dance” in 1926 – the first openly homosexual German-language novel ever.
A life like on a volcano
In his search for love, Klaus Mann also got involved with dubious characters, but that did not always help him. He led a life as if on a volcano (which is also the title of one of his best books), restless and always on the move, always busy with new ideas and projects, heavily addicted to drugs and chain smoking, plus a speed writer, who easily switched to English during their exile, while others still practiced the “th”.
Klaus Mann first encountered death as a child. The journeyman baker from the neighboring village died in a pond at the Mann family’s summer residence in Bad Tölz, Bavaria. “We saw his body, neatly laid out among flowers and candles,” Medicus quotes from Mann’s autobiography “The Turning Point.”
The biographer wisely leaves it open whether this was a key experience for Klaus Mann. But as early as 1924, when he was only 18 years old, Mann had suicidal thoughts. Attempts to commit suicide can always be interpreted as cries for help from those around them. If this had been the case for Mann, he would have needed a lot of help, because he made similar attempts repeatedly in the course of his short life.
The relationship with his father in turn had to become a matter of life and death, because Klaus Mann became a writer like him and thus measured himself against the world-famous producer. He got him out of many difficult situations, spoke good words and together with his wife Katja helped him out of financial calamities time and again. According to Medicus, the son rarely appreciated this.
No criticism of the father’s work
Of course, Klaus, like the other Mann children, listened to the “magician” Thomas Mann when he read from a new novel that was being written. There is no criticism of the father’s works either.
At the very end of his life, Klaus came up with a new idea according to which all contemporary intellectuals would commit collective suicide in protest against the state of affairs in the world after the end of World War II, which in turn would shock people out of their lethargy.
Fortunately, as Medicus rightly notes, nothing came out of the novel with built-in patricide. But because Klaus’ relationship with his father was so difficult, Medicus’ biography also had to be a bit of a book about Thomas Mann. But that can’t hurt at all.
Thomas Medicus follows his character closely, sometimes almost too closely, it seems. Because as much as we learn about Klaus Mann in his biography, it is a pity that his political turns are sometimes viewed from the outside, but in passing.
From dandy to editor
This is most striking in the change Klaus Mann made with the beginning of Hitler’s dictatorship. From a writer who put the ‘I’ central, he quickly became editor of one of the most important literary monthly magazines of the exile: that of Querido in Amsterdam. Collection. How this came about is largely unknown.
What qualified the ‘Dandy’ to lead a project that was eminently political? How did the correspondence with other well-known authors proceed? And was there no resistance? Similar gaps appear in Medicus’ book in Mann’s journey from exiled author in New York City to American soldier on the propaganda front in Europe.
Nevertheless, the work of Thomas Medicus remains a high point of the biographical approach to a writer. Klaus Mann left behind great works, but also rather meager entertainment literature. The latter certainly does not represent his biography.