The life and Lives of Thomas Mann

Between 1978 and 2002 six writers — three English, two American and one German — published Lives of Thomas Mann (1875-1955).  These biographers also had other interests and achievements.  Nigel Hamilton wrote military and presidential histories.  Richard Winston translated Mann and wrote lives of Charlemagne and Thomas Beckett.  Ronald Hayman was a dramatist and actor.  Donald Prater, soldier and diplomat, wrote lives of Rilke and Stefan Zweig.  Anthony Heilbut, rather incongruously, produced records of gospel music.  Hermann Kurzke was a Catholic theologian and professor at the University of Mainz.

These authors took different approaches to Mann’s character, relations with his wife and six prodigiously gifted children, his illnesses, habits, tastes and interests.  They discuss the genesis and meaning of his work, his famous friendships, reading and influences, travels and lectures, controversy and conflicts, and the reversal of his political ideas from reactionary to democratic.  The biographies of Hayman, Prater and Heilbut appeared in the mid-1990s.  These writers, as well as Kurzke, took advantage of the revelations in Mann’s Diaries (published in ten volumes from 1977 to 1995) to emphasize his secret sex life.

In The Brothers Mann (1978), Nigel Hamilton (born 1944) convincingly argues that Thomas and Heinrich Mann had the most significant literary brotherhood of all time.  In their  lives “German history was mirrored—and borne out—in all its agony.  From outright mutual hostility in the First World War they became reconciled, stood with consistent courage for democracy in an age of rising fascism, and presided over the German émigré movement in exile.”  Hamilton is perceptive about the relationship of the brothers—the dominant theme of the book—as it moves from rivalry, jealousy and ideological conflict to mature friendship and mutual respect.

Heinrich, Thomas’ older brother, chairman of the Prussian Academy and “perhaps the most lucid and perceptive of all Hitler’s opponents among European intellectuals”, was the more influential figure in Weimar Germany.  But Thomas, who frequently visited America in the 1930s, completely eclipsed his brother in the New World.  While Heinrich moved from adulation to neglect and died impoverished and obscure, Thomas received many honorary doctorates from American universities, taught at Princeton as a visiting professor of literature, lectured in every major city in the United States and was personally acquainted with President Roosevelt, whose New Deal policies influenced his novel Joseph the Provider (1944).

Heinrich Mann (born 1871) is a German prose writer and public figure, older brother of Thomas Mann. (image created in Shutterstock)

Hamilton’s book, the first English biography of either Thomas or Heinrich, is worthy of its important subject.  He has great breadth of learning  and a thorough grasp of complex material, and writes in a clear and lively style, perhaps too frequently halted by thick chunks of quotation.  Since Heinrich is not well known in English-speaking countries, Hamilton emphasises and sometimes overrates his rather turgid novels.

Though the background of the Mann family is familiar to readers of Buddenbrooks (1901), Hamilton makes some useful comparisons between the historical reality and the imaginative recreation.  Both brothers were failures in school and in business, to the great disappointment of their highly successful father, but published major literary works while still in their twenties.  Thomas, at the end of his life, said that his father’s example always stood behind him and he “always regretted that in his own lifetime I gave him such little hope that I would one day achieve anything in the world.”  Though their father disapproved of writing as a career, their mother was more understanding and disobeyed the senator by encouraging their artistic ambitions.  After her husband’s death, she paid for the publication of Heinrich’s first book and urged Thomas to leave his clerical job in an insurance office and devote himself to literature.

Mann’s lifelong rivalry with his initially more popular and prolific older brother Heinrich (whose novel Professor Unrat inspired the 1930 film classic The Blue Angel), began in childhood when they shared a room but did not speak to each other for more than a year.  The “tragedy of brotherhood” theme appears throughout the works of Mann, who satirised Heinrich’s soulless eroticism and aesthetic iciness in his early stories “The Dilettante” and “The Will to Happiness.”  The brothers quarrelled violently about politics during the Great War, but became reconciled when both opposed the Nazis.  By this time far more successful, Thomas provided substantial financial help during Heinrich’s disastrous years in America.

In the late 1890s Heinrich was living in Italy and publishing a novel almost every year.  Thomas joined him in Palestrina, outside Rome, in 1897 when he began to write Buddenbrooks and the brothers spent their days and nights together, excluding the rest of the world.  Thomas was strangely detached from Italy, though it provided the setting of three great works: “Death in Venice,” “Mario and the Magician” and parts of Doctor Faustus.  It mainly provided “a contrast to his native land, a chance to ‘flee’ Germans, to be alone.  But it was the land in which Heinrich was ‘at home,’ whose language Heinrich spoke, whose monuments and art Heinrich loved.”

Soon after the success of his first novel, which brought him international fame at the age of 26, Thomas met Katia Pringsheim, the attractive daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Germany. She was also the first woman to pass the university entrance examination in Bavaria and to study mathematics in Munich.  Thomas fell deeply in love with her, courted her assiduously, and described her to Heinrich as “indescribably rare and precious, a creation whose simple existence outweighs the cultural activities of fifteen writers or thirty painters”. He eventually wed this daughter of a Jewish mathematics professor, and had a happy and fruitful marriage.

Thomas and Katia Mann

When the Great War broke out, the “European” Heinrich and the “German” Thomas found themselves in profound and public opposition.  Heinrich pessimistically attacked Germany’s disastrous role in the war, while the misguided Thomas, who had previously evaded military service, became the self-appointed spiritual spokesman for the “detested” nation.

Thomas won the Nobel Prize in 1929.  The publication of the first volume of his Joseph and His Brothers tetralogy during the Nazi regime in 1933 provoked violent attacks from German émigrés and he was eventually forced to take a political stand.  As Hamilton remarks: “The urge to be involved—to cast aside questions of Nobel dignity or literary reputation—was a sign of courage; and without that courage, that pride, could Thomas have ever survived the years of physical and spiritual deprivation in exile, the envy and sniping that would dog him until death?”

Their opposition to the Nazi regime healed the breach between the brothers, and one friend wryly remarked that they now read ceremonial speeches to each other when their birthdays were publicly celebrated every ten years.  Thomas moved to Princeton in 1938; Heinrich found his life in danger when the Germans invaded France.  After an unsuccessful courtship of one woman and unhappy marriage to another, Heinrich had married his mistress, a Berlin barmaid of dubious reputation, in 1939.  Later that year they illegally crossed the Pyrenees on foot with Franz Werfel, his wife Alma Mahler and Thomas’s second son, Golo Mann.  As they sailed to the United States from Lisbon on a Greek ship and the image of Europe faded, Heinrich felt bereft: “a lost lover was not more beautiful”. His years in America were disastrous; he was overwhelmed by poverty and his wife’s madness, which ended in her suicide.  Though “her affairs with other men, her drunkenness and insensitivity to etiquette were bound to outrage Thomas’ household, to Heinrich they were merely quintessential womanhood”. There were emotional scenes when Heinrich brought his crazy, vulgar wife to meet his brother’s distinguished guests.

This biography reveals an essentially harmonious Thomas. He successfully fused art and life, had a long and fruitful marriage, possessed the intelligence to recognize the errors of his early political opinions and the courage to change them, adapted to an exile that cost him nearly all his German readers, became the leading spokesman for the anti-Nazi writers, had a triumphant career in the United States, worked selflessly for the benefit of European émigrés, bravely opposed the postwar anti-Communist hysteria in America and, despite political upheavals and endless crises, remained dedicated to his literary vocation.

Richard Winston (1917-79), who translated Mann’s Letters, was ideally suited to write Thomas Mann: The Making of an Artist, 1875-1911 (1982).  Though he did not interview many people who knew Mann and rarely refers to unpublished letters and diaries, he has a clearer focus than Peter de Mendelssohn’s massively detailed German biography, Der Zauberer (“The Magician”).  Winston has a thorough knowledge of Mann’s works, a mastery of the social and literary life of Wilhelmine Germany, and an elegant prose style.  He’s particularly good on the relationship of the life to the fiction.  He provides sensitive readings of early stories such as “Tristan” and “Blood of the Walsungs”; notes that “even at his simplest and most youthful, Mann was complex and mature”; and is excellent on the genesis of the partly  autobiographical Buddenbrooks.

Richard Winston (1917-79) ‘Thomas Mann: The Making of an Artist, 1875-1911’ (1982).

Mann was born in the Baltic town of Lübeck, the son of a prosperous grain merchant and a half-Brazilian mother (the artistic influence of mixed blood is an important theme in early works such as “Tonio Kröger”).  He had a sheltered and happy childhood, but did poorly in school and was twice kept back to repeat a year.  Mann used research in medicine, mythology and medievalism to stimulate his imagination and supply the scholarly foundations of his fiction.  But he modestly wrote that, though often taken for a man of encyclopedic knowledge, “In reality I am, for a (forgive the phrase) world-famous writer, almost inconceivably ill-educated.  As soon as I finish the book for whose sake I run up such expenditures of scholarship, I forget with incredible speed everything I have learned.”  He completed high school only to evade army service, but made good use of his early English classes when he moved to America.

After leaving school Mann worked briefly in a Munich fire-insurance office, audited courses at the university, and came under the intoxicating influence of Wagner, who was—with Goethe and Nietzsche—one of the main artistic influences in his life.  He employed the Wagnerian leitmotif in his fiction, adopted the Master’s belief that music aroused unconscious emotions and brought musical structure to perfection in his late novel about a Nietzschean composer, Doctor Faustus.

When Thomas lived with Heinrich in Rome and Palestrina, he felt intensely conscious of his Germanness and began his first major work, Buddenbrooks.  This novel, composed in a sequence of brief chapters, revealed his extraordinary powers of observation and his painstaking realism.  It was elaborately planned before a word was written, and anticipated the ideas of Max Weber on the relation of the Protestant work ethic to the rise of capitalism.

Mann consistently strove to use autobiography for artistic ends, felt “the personal was given its highest value when it was converted to literature,” and was frequently guilty of exploiting family and friends for his fictional purposes (he portrayed his sister’s suicide, for example, in Doctor Faustus).  He refused to cut the lengthy Buddenbrooks, which eventually appeared intact in two volumes.  It provoked fury in Lübeck, which regarded the novel “as an act of outrageous impudence or cheap revenge by a ne’er-do-well who had turned his back on the city”.

In contrast to Heinrich’s eclat, confidence and bohemianism, Thomas was stiff, dignified and withdrawn, and rarely addressed even close friends as du.  (His public readings, however, were masterly performances that thrilled his audiences.)  While completing Buddenbrooks he formed an intense “post-adolescent crush” on the young Paul Ehrenberg, which was replaced by his love for Katia Pringsheim.

One of Winston’s finest perceptions concerns the pattern of sexual displacement in Mann’s life and art: “Tonio Kröger’s attachment to Hans Hansen is shortly after transmuted into his love for Ingeborg Holm.  Hans Castorp’s memories of Pribislav Hippe are very quickly diverted into his infatuation with Clavdia Chauchat.  Adrian Leverkühn’s relationship with Rudi Schwerdtfeger is followed directly by his decision to marry Marie Godeau.”

This volume ends in 1911 with the publication of “Death in Venice”.  In the doomed love of the suspect and anti-social homosexual Gustav von Aschenbach, Mann found the perfect pattern for the artist’s desperate struggle to recapture the ideal form of sensual beauty, and to unite passion with thought, grace with wisdom, the real with the ideal.

It’s a great loss to modern letters that Winston died before he had written about Mann’s reactionary defense of Germany in the Great War; the completion of his masterpieces The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers and Doctor Faustus; his receipt of the Nobel Prize; his opposition to Hitler, exile from Germany and leadership of the anti-Nazi émigrés; and his return in 1952 to Switzerland, where he completed The Black Swan and the witty Confessions of Felix Krull.

Ronald Hayman (1932-2019) was an experienced playwright, actor and director before writing excellent biographies of Nietzsche, Brecht, Kafka, Sartre and Proust.  His intelligent, perceptive and well-written Thomas Mann: A Biography (1994) has a Prologue announcing his dominant themes and a detailed 50-page Chronology.  Hayman describes Mann as “elegant, dignified, self-assured, dispassionate and rather aloof.”  Mann described himself more critically as “moody, self-torturing, sceptical, irritable but sensitive and hungry for sympathy.”  Hayman shows how Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian-Apollonian struggle, his ideas about decay and nihilism, his need for cruel self-punishment and “useful suffering”, his sense that “I have never felt happier with myself than in the sickest periods of my life”, influenced Mann’s belief in the morbid connection between disease and art: “An artist is done for as soon as he becomes human and begins to feel. . . . An honest, healthy, decent man doesn’t write, act or compose.”  Hayman writes that, in contrast to Mann’s self-controlled public image, “he was prone to fits of nausea, nervous trembling and convulsive sobbing,” but Mann believed that his art improved as his health deteriorated.

Mann hated school and declared with bitter irony, “everything that school teaches can be regarded as preparation for life: competitiveness, cringing, deception.”  He also disliked Italy: “The whole bellezza makes me uneasy.  I cannot bear all those fearfully lively people down there with their dark animal glances.”  He satirized Italians in his two greatest short works: “Death in Venice” and “Mario and the Magician”.

The central emotional experience of Mann’s life between 1899 and 1904 was his love for the handsome, fair-haired Paul Ehrenberg, son of a Dresden artist.  Despite all the biographical truffle-hunting and Mann’s obvious longing for attractive young men, often portrayed in his fiction, there is no evidence that he had sex with men.  He was homoerotic, not homosexual, and did nothing more than “kiss this or that young man on the lips”.  He preferred to fantasise rather than have actual sexual relations and noted, “Affairs with different men are incomprehensible.  How can one sleep with a man?”  For him, frustration was an essential part of the pleasure.

His wife Katia, an intelligent beauty from a cultured family, cured him of Ehrenberg.  When courting her he told a friend, “You cannot believe how much I love this creature.  I dream about her every night and wake up with my heart hurting all over.”  She was also a suitable stand-in for her attractive twin brother.  They married in 1905, and after their fourth child was born he threatened self-immolation: “If it happens a fifth time, I shall pour petrol over myself and set light to it.”  He somehow had two more children—a total of six: Erika, Klaus, Monika, Golo, Elisabeth and Michael—but remained unincinerated.

Katia gave him security, devotion and admiration.  They spoke German at home; and she helped him with his French and English letters and lectures (he called his American publisher Alfred Knopf a “creature” when he meant “creative”).  Katia inspired the heroine of Royal Highness (1909) and the setting of The Magic Mountain (1924), and she provided the crucial pathological anecdote in The Black Swan.  Mann later praised “the clever, courageous and gently energetic support of his extraordinary spouse”.

Mann called his lifelong conflict with Heinrich, “the most serious problem of my life.  Such great closeness and such strong inner repulsion are painful.”  Heinrich, quick off the mark, was the first to establish a literary reputation.  But Thomas soon eclipsed him with the brilliant success of Buddenbrooks.  They bitterly opposed each other during the Great War, when Thomas attacked the so-called civilisation of the Allies, extolled by Heinrich, “as something that involved softening, while German culture depended on an almost tribal sense of unity, strength, form and energy.”  In opposition to Heinrich, Thomas expounded his anti-democratic and pro-war views at great length in Reflections of a  Non-Political Man (1918), which he later repudiated and suppressed.

Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (German: Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen) by Thomas Mann

Thomas’ rigid and effective writing schedule took place at home every day between 9 and 12, when he produced three pages of fiction.  He then went on a pensive walk with his dog, napped after lunch, wrote letters and articles in the late afternoon, played the violin or listened to music after dinner, and retired to bed with a book.  He also liked to write during his many seaside holidays on the Venice Lido or the Baltic coast.  An amusing photo shows the 57-year-old bespectacled sage sur la plage, leaning against a huge hooded beach chair, wearing a two-piece bathing costume and long socks held up with incongruous garters.

Hayman effectively analyses the historical background, extensive research, and gradual evolution of Buddenbrooks and the later novels.  Mann always collected postcards, brochures and travel clippings from magazines to refresh his memory and stimulate his imagination.  His fiction is shot through with irony and nihilism, with forbidden love for androgynous characters and the recurrent spasms of disease.  He portrays Hanno’s fatal typhoid in Buddenbrooks, Aschenbach’s cholera in “Death in Venice,” Castorp’s tuberculosis in The Magic Mountain, Leverkühn’s syphilis in Doctor Faustus and Rosalie Tümmler’s uterine cancer in The Black Swan.  He nobly apologised to the eminent German playwright Gerhart Hauptmann—“the need was artistic”—for using him as the model for the impressively incoherent Peeperkorn, who unexpectedly turns up with Clavdia toward the end of The Magic Mountain.

It’s worth noting that the inevitable retreat to the tuberculosis sanatorium of the incurable patients, Clavdia and Joachim, is an ironic allusion to Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return.  The characters’ names are also significant.  The real Luigi Settembrini (1813-77) was an Italian author, revolutionary and prisoner of the Austrian oppressors.  In Parallel Lives, Plutarch describes a chasm of fire “where flames constantly shoot up into the air like a fiery fountain, and the stream of naphtha [the name of Settembrini’s volcanic adversary] is so extensive that it forms a lake quite close to the chasm.”  W. H. Auden’s poem “September 1,1939” connects the demonic element in German history from Luther to Hitler (whose hometown was Linz, Austria) that Mann portrayed in Doctor Faustus, where the devil speaks to Leverkühn in archaic Reformation diction:

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

From Luther until now

That has driven a culture mad,

Find what occurred at Linz,

What huge imago made

A psychopathic god.

Mann gave hundreds of lectures that interrupted his writing. But he was well paid, received adulation and sold his books; he exerted political influence, got an audience response, aroused interest in his future bestsellers; he visited friends and met luminaries.  He spoke to as many as 18,000 people in Madison Square Garden in New York, and Hayman notes that he came alive on stage: “His voice was sonorous, his delivery steady and distinct, the timbre constantly undulating, and he gave each syllable a precise value.”  But his distant travels and talks exhausted him.  He complained that his hosts extracted the maximum benefit from their honoured guest: “These Americans know how to take advantage of one, not to say bleed one dry; they themselves have no nerves at all and it does not occur to them that other people get tired.”  En route, he met H. G. Wells, Bernard  Shaw, T. S. Eliot, André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Freud, Einstein, Nehru and Roosevelt, the “wheelchair Caesar”, who twice invited him to the White House.  Igor Stravinsky called Mann “virtuous, courageous, patient, kind and sincere”.

Mann had lost everything in Germany when he publicly opposed Hitler: money, house, possessions, publisher and readers — though in March 1933 Erika boldly sneaked back to their house in Munich and rescued the precious manuscript of Joseph and His Brothers.  But he was very successful during his American exile (1938-52), helped by his wealthy, influential and generous patron Agnes Meyer.  She was married to the owner of the Washington Post, and had been the lover of the French poet and ambassador Paul Claudel.  Mann got to hate the “stupid,” dictatorial and infuriating Agnes (twelve years younger than him) and vented his anger in a series of splenetic letters: “My desire to kick the tyrannical old bag out of my life is almost uncontrollable. . . . Ghastly affection.  Away.  Away”—as if he were exorcising the devil.  When she told Golo that his father despised her, Thomas was amused and surprised: “Since my letters are full of devotion, admiration, gratitude, concern, even gallantry, that is a very intelligent observation.”

Mann paid dearly for his tremendous achievement.  He was often ill and confined to sanatoria and hospitals.  His younger actress-sister Carla was engaged to be married when her former lover threatened to expose her unless she slept with him.  She gave in but he betrayed her, and in 1910 she committed suicide with cyanide.  Her poignant death-note to her fiancé said, “Once I deceived you, but I love you.”  In 1929 his older sister Julia, impoverished and addicted to morphine, hanged herself.  In Los Angeles in 1944 Heinrich’s vulgar, alcoholic wife “fortunately” (Mann said) killed herself with sleeping pills.  Worse still, his eldest, homosexual son Klaus, the talented author of novels including Mephisto, also became addicted to morphine and in 1949 slashed his wrists in Cannes, France.  In 1977, 22 years after Mann’s death, his youngest son Michael, a professional violist and scholar of German literature, took an overdose of barbiturates in California.

Donald Prater (1918-2001) had not read Ronald Hayman’s recently published biography, which pipped him at the post and depleted his sales.  Hayman’s book is more lively, personal and sympathetic; Prater’s Thomas Mann: A Life (1995) portrays the novelist as “a man easier to admire than to love”. He unfairly claims—as if Mann himself were his characters Aschenbach and Leverkühn—that he lacked real feelings for other people, had a “glacial stiffness”, and was egoistic and bombastic.  Prater emphasises Mann’s political beliefs and public life after Hitler took power in 1933.  He neglects the masterful novels, and absurdly exclaims that Mann “lacked imagination” and published “only eight volumes of fiction” — as if Tolstoy had published only War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

Prater’s Preface notes that, except for Goethe, “more has been written about Thomas Mann than about any other German” or indeed any other modern writer.  He states that Mann “has a fascination more historical than literary”, and that the main aim of his biography “is to present in some [excessive] detail the events of a life unremitting in dedication to renown”.

Mann, uneasy about the homosexual revelations in his early diaries, burned them in 1896.  In April 1933, after he’d gone into exile, he asked Golo to pack his more recent diaries in a suitcase and send them to Lugano.  He then added, “I am counting on you to be discreet and not read any of these things.”  Unlike Erika, who took great risks to rescue the Joseph manuscript in March, Golo naively gave the suitcase to their chauffeur to send, but he turned it over to the Nazis.  Mann feared he would be ruined by the sexual scandal, but his lawyer luckily managed to recover some of the diaries and send them to Switzerland.

In “Little Herr Friedemann” and other early stories, sex creeps into the hero’s sheltered existence and destroys him.  In “Little Lizzy” (1900), a contemptuous unfaithful wife forces her husband to dress as a woman and sing in public, a humiliation that ends with his collapse and death onstage.  When Mann’s first child Erika was born in 1906, he wrote, with strange exaggeration: “perhaps a daughter will bring me psychologically closer to the ‘other’ sex, of which, though I’m now a husband, I still know nothing.”  It seemed entirely natural to Mann to be physically attracted to and fall in love with his teenaged son Klaus, when he secretly saw him tanned and naked.

Klaus and Erika Mann in 1927

Erika and Klaus had urged the exiled Mann to attack Hitler, but he cautiously hesitated until 1936 when, as he feared, he lost everything.  Stripped of his honorary doctorate at the University of Bonn, in January 1937 he wrote a brilliant reply to the Dean and concluded, as Germany headed for war: “God help our darkened and desecrated country and teach it to make peace with the world and with itself.”  Though Klaus was a talented novelist, courageous anti-fascist, journalist during the Spanish Civil War and wartime soldier in the American army, he could never emerge from his father’s shadow.  He was homosexual, like Erika and Golo, and had a loose hold on life.  When he killed himself, Mann said it was a selfish act that “showed irresponsibility and a grievous lack of consideration” for Katia and Erika.  He was especially close to Erika, who had married Klaus’ lover.

Mann’s meetings with Freud, during his political exile and when they were both in personal danger, created one of his great intellectual and emotional friendships of the 1930s.  Mann suppressed his doubts about Freud’s fantastic speculations on Napoleon and Moses, abandoned his characteristic irony and remained extremely reverential to the older man. The Austrian Freud graciously welcomed Mann’s heartfelt tributes and admired the inherent nobility of the North German literary genius.

After five years of exile in France and Switzerland, Mann moved to America in 1938.  He was attracted to the blue skies and mild climate, the colony of German exiles and the glamorous movie world of Los Angeles, a stimulating setting to complete his Joseph novels.  He later felt that America, a consolation and refuge, had been “exceedingly good” to him.  He was awarded seven honorary degrees, which more than compensated for the loss of the one at Bonn.

When Agnes Meyer arranged his lucrative and undemanding teaching position at Princeton, Mann bought a splendid house there.  Prater writes: “Secluded behind a brick wall and with mature pines and a dogwood, elegant and practical, it was more than ample for their needs.  There were five bedrooms, a large library, vast reception rooms and a separate studio marked as his study.”  His annual three-week lecture tours, which even reached a remote high school in Topeka, Kansas, involved the strain of long train trips, endless interviews and many tedious conversations with adhesive admirers.

Monika, his second daughter, bitterly complained to Prater that she’d felt neglected by her father, who openly favoured her two sisters, and she remained resentful about her role as outsider in the family.  In September 1940 Monika’s ship, en route to Canada with many evacuated English children, was torpedoed by a German submarine.  She survived by clinging to a piece of wood for 20 hours while her husband, a Hungarian art historian, drowned in heavy seas before her eyes.

Monika Mann (first left) with her mother and siblings, 1919

Another disaster occurred in April 1946 while he was writing Doctor Faustus. He had a life-threatening operation for cancer, with the removal of a rib and two-thirds of his right lung, which he barely survived.  He was furious after the war when many pro-Nazi writers who’d remained in Germany accused him of “abandoning” the country, and with self-pity and denial of guilt falsely claimed they’d been doing valuable work as silent “inner émigrés”.

Prater’s useful Epilogue follows the lives of the wife and children who survived Mann: Katia, Erika, the historian Golo, Monika (who lived in Capri), the oceanographer Elisabeth, and the musician and scholar Michael.  All but his favourite Elisabeth wrote memoirs, which were supplemented by Mann’s younger, pro-Nazi brother Victor and Michael’s son Frido, the model for the tragic child Nepo in Doctor Faustus.

In Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (1995) the homosexual Anthony Heilbut (born 1940, the son of German-Jewish refugees) is determined to “out” Mann, in his closet drama, as an active homosexual and erotic writer.  He states that when Mann was fourteen he fell in love with a classmate, and in old age remembered it as the most “delicate, blissfully painful” time of his life.  He also claims, without proof, that Mann had a sexual affair in 1899 with Paul Ehrenberg.  Heilbut writes that though Mann’s three homosexual children lived out his own desires, he was privately tormented by sexual longings.  Yet he also argues that Mann’s art released his pent-up emotions, that his “literary transformations displayed Mann’s ‘power’ to know the men he loved better than life had allowed him”.  Mann’s imaginative anticipation was actually greater than any physical pleasure, and he observed that “the secret and almost silent adventures in life are the finest”.  As John Keats wrote about perfect and eternally unconsummated love in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “for ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”

Heilbut notes that just as Klaus Mann was influenced by the homosexuals Jean Cocteau and André Gide (the subject of one of his books), his father Thomas was inspired by Walt Whitman’s “I sing the body electric” in his outspoken “Calamus” poems.  Thomas praised Whitman in “On the German Republic” (1922), but his translator Helen Lowe-Porter cut a crucial passage that idealised and justified homosexuality: “in the zone of Eros the generally accepted law of sexual polarity proves to be invalid, and in like with like, whether mature masculinity and adoring youth, joined in a dream of themselves as gods, or young males drawn to their own mirror image, they are bound in a passionate community.”

In his useful book Exiled in Paradise (1984) about German refugees in America, Heilbut had described Mann’s last 22 years, the period emphasised by Prater.  This biography covers Mann’s life and work up to the early 1930s.  To distinguish his book from Hayman’s and Prater’s, Heilbut pounds away at his homosexual thesis.  The book also has serious faults and many errors.  His sudden, extremely confusing shifts back-and-forth in time, describing early events late in the book, break the chronology and muddle the narrative.  His Introduction states that Mann has suffered the disdain of modern critics, that his stock has fallen low and that he’s been dropped from the canon.  But the three biographies published within two years and the torrent of literary studies two decades after Mann’s death disprove Heilbut’s assertions.

Heilbut interrupts his fragmented narrative with a 35-page discourse on The Magic Mountain that is packed with astonishing mistakes.  The young Clavdia is childless, but not “infertile”. Naphta is not “defrocked”, but still a Jesuit priest.  Peeperkorn is not a Russian cotton planter from Indonesia (the name of a country that did not exist until 1949), but a Dutch coffee planter from the Dutch East Indies.  Castorp is certainly not schizophrenic and not homosexual.  He’s madly in love with Clavdia, sleeps with her and waits years for her return to the sanatorium.  Heilbut’s errors continue when he ventures beyond the novel.  Voltaire did not “refuse to acknowledge the Lisbon earthquake”; he wrote a long poem about it.  Yeats in “Among School Children,” not Werner Heisenberg, “could not abstract the dancer from the dance.”  D. H. Lawrence was not a “famous resident” of Munich.  Mrs. Moore does not “lose her reason” in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India.

This banquet of misinformation continues when Heilbut discusses Mann’s essay on Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent.  Conrad, the son of an exiled Polish revolutionary, was indeed an “outsider”.  But Mann, the son of wealthy German merchants who became the influential spokesman for German culture, was not.  Both could be “pinned down politically”.  Mann became an anti-fascist, left-wing democrat; Conrad was an anti-Russian conservative.  Mann’s Naptha is not like Conrad’s professor, who actually carries a bomb and threatens to blow people up.  Thomas Buddenbrook (not “stricken in the snow”) in comfortable Lübeck and Conrad’s Kurtz in the cannibalistic Congo do not represent the same “horror”.

Heilbut calls Franz Kafka the “acolyte” and “literary offspring” of Mann, but his argument is contradictory and unconvincing.  He states that “Kafka’s oneiric tales point toward fable and allegory, Mann’s [by contrast] convey a mixture of social realism and case study.”  He adds: “It’s worth noting that Mann’s political development, which began that year [1920], reflected his turn from Spengler to Kafka,” though Kafka had no influence on Mann’s political life.  He also absurdly states that Hanno’s embarrassing speech before his family in Buddenbrooks “is quite as terrible as Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis” into a repulsive insect.

Mann was sexually stimulated by Ludwig von Hofmann’s crudely drawn, mediocre painting The Spring (1914), which was well hung in Mann’s study.  This picture shows a rocky landscape with three naked men, two with their buttocks seen from the rear and ready to receive, as one bends over to drink.  The third man, facing forward but with his genitals covered, looks down on them.  Heilbut calls them “pederastic . . . swimming youths,” though they are neither, and claims the painting “inspired the Arcadian scene in the chapter ‘Snow’” in The Magic Mountain.  It’s more likely that the painting inspired the scene in “Fullness of Harmony” when Castorp plays his precious records. Heilbut has five references to Franz Schubert, but each one repeats that the composer wrote Hans Castorp’s favorite tune, Der Lindenbaum (“The Lime Tree”).  In the musical chapter Castorp plays his Lindenbaum record, whose first line—the watery Am Brunnen vor dem Tore (“At the Fountain near the Gate”)—invokes his romantic yearning for death.

Heilbut writes that the scandals in Katia Pringsheim’s family “balanced the Mann history of suicides and mental collapse”.  Her father was a well-known philanderer.  Her brother Erik was murdered in South America by a cuckolded husband.  Klaus Mann described the suicide of his actress-aunt Carla, which foreshadowed his own self-destruction, as an “exquisitely botched attempt at theatre”. Heilbut notes that “Klaus’ characteristic blend of voyeurism, narcissism, melancholy and nostalgia is a self-consciously decadent, if not campy, variation on his father’s themes.”

Heilbut connects Klaus to Mann’s love for the 17-year-old Klaus Heuser, whom he met on a Baltic holiday in August 1927.  In October, when Heuser visited him in Munich, Mann wrote an extraordinary letter about him to his son Klaus, his rival in love: “I call him Du, and he consented to my embracing him on my breast.  Klaus [Mann] is herewith asked to voluntarily withdraw and not to invade my circle.  I am already old and famous, and why should you be the only ones who constantly sin, because of that?   I have it in writing that these two weeks were the most beautiful of his life, and that it has been difficult to return home.”  Heilbut, as always, exaggerates the sexual aspect of Mann’s rather innocent infatuation.  Alex Ross (in the New Yorker of January 24, 2022) reports that a German scholar interviewed the homosexual Heuser, who said that “nothing remotely sexual had taken place with Thomas Mann”.

In Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art: A Biography (2002), Hermann Kurzke (born 1943) has an obsessive, even prurient interest in Mann’s suppressed passion and celibate homoeroticism.  He identifies the real models for Mann’s fictional characters, nails everything down to biographical fact and, like Heilbut, tries to “out” Mann with what he concedes are “biographically unreliable” novels.  The  adolescent and adult Thomas Mann fell in love with several handsome boys and men, but never had sexual relations with any of them.  His bisexual Sehnsucht gave him penetrating insight into human nature and enabled him to create some of the most complex characters in modern literature.  In 1981 Richard Winston had already noted this pattern of sexual displacement in Mann’s life and art.

Kurzke’s Teutonic, pedantic, long-winded and heavy-handed study, moving from work to work and theme to theme in short, discrete feuilletons (with ponderous titles and sudden transitions), is literary criticism dressed up as biography.  The Chronicle at the head of each section provides the skeleton of biographical facts, which is not fleshed out in the text.  The chronology is chaotic: Mann’s move to Switzerland in 1952 is mentioned just after his birth in 1875 and “The Path to Marriage” comes after he’s actually married.  Kurzke introduces important characters—the  childhood friend Otto Grautoff, the writer Ernst Bertram, the critic Paul Amman and the patron Agnes Meyer, as well as “Cynthia” and “Franzl,” without explaining who they are.  He claims that Mann “had no real friends,” but ignores his vital friendships with Hesse, Freud, Einstein, the conductor Bruno Walter, the philosopher Erich Kahler and the classicist Karl Karényi.  Kurzke does not describe how Erika Mann rescued the manuscript of the Joseph novels after her father’s house in Munich had been seized by the Gestapo, nor Mann’s dangerous operation for lung cancer in 1946, which tested his characteristic “sympathy for death” while he was writing Doctor Faustus.

The shameful number of typographical errors in this book does a great disservice to the author and disgraces Princeton University Press.  There are variant spellings of the same name: Kerensky, Judah, Katia, Maria and Esmeralda.  The same work appears as A Sketch of My Life and Summary of My Life, the same journal as Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert and Das XX. Jahrhundert.  Louis XIV appears as “Ludwig XIV”; the familiar Clavdia is confusingly printed as the Germanic Clawdia; and the reference to The Fireman is completely opaque.  There are many repetitive passages, many long paragraphs of bulletin-like snippets from Mann’s letters, and twelve solid pages of salacious extracts from his diaries without a single word of comment or analysis.  The notes, bibliography and index entries for Mann and his works are omitted from the American edition, and the source of the quotations is often unclear.

There are also several glaring contradictions.  Was Mann’s father cultured or not?  Did Mann meet Katia in 1903?  Was Erika or Klaus his oldest child?  Did he live in Pacific Palisades or Santa Monica?  Did he have a “love affair” with Cynthia?  Kurzke is puzzled by Mann’s reference to Antilochus, who was the son of Nestor and trusted friend of Achilles.  He calls Mann “a lover of Communism”, though he refused lucrative invitations to live in East Germany and refused the extremely valuable Stalin Prize.  Kurzke also goes in for portentous but meaningless statements: “The writer does not recall any reluctance to exchange the dark of his mother’s womb for the light of day”; Thomas and Heinrich “must have talked about a lot of things”; “Anyone who wants to be a storyteller must have something special to say”; “A correspondence comes into being only when people are separated by distance”—though members of the same household sometimes correspond; “An orgasm that analyses itself doesn’t even happen”; “Smoking is spiritualization.”

This guazzabuglio (to use one of Settembrini’s favorite words), highly praised in the German press and in the TLS, is compounded by a horrendous translation, which forces the reader to struggle through many sentences to grasp the approximate meaning.  Leslie Willson has the cheek to criticise Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations as “somewhat flawed” and then produce her own horrendous renditions: “And because to plumb the human soul / The urge has also captured me scornfully” and “Here is a man most highly lacking: / Fully great and small passions packing” as well as many other torture-to-read monstrosities.

A few telling details occasionally enliven the inert narrative.  Mann was physically assaulted by a thieving servant who, representing “the oppressed class”, was exonerated when he took her to court.  A visit to his wife’s Swiss sanatorium in 1912 provided the original impetus for The Magic Mountain, but her surviving X-ray shows no sign of tuberculosis and we owe the novel to a misdiagnosis.  In 1925, the year after that novel appeared, Hagedorn & Sons named their cigar Thomas Mann.  After a political speech in Berlin in 1930, Mann disguised himself with snow goggles and narrowly escaped from Nazi thugs who didn’t want to get blood on their rented tuxedos.  In partial exchange for royalties stolen by the East Germans, Mann accepted a tailor-made Russian mink coat with an otter collar.

When discussing Mann’s literary technique, Kurzke argues that he “preferred finding to inventing” and that Joseph was the first work without human models.  But he fails to see the larger pattern in Mann’s art.  After The Magic Mountain, the last work based on personal experience, he turned to mythology and the Bible in the Joseph tetralogy; to the lives of Goethe in The Beloved Returns, Nietzsche in Doctor Faustus and  St. Gregory in The Holy Sinner; and finally completed the Felix Krull fragment, abandoned for forty years.

Katia Mann was the ideal wife for a writer: more loyal than Jessie Conrad or Nora Joyce and more intelligent than both of them.  Mann, a remote but loving father, was quick to forgive the faults of his six children and to let them have their own way.  Five of them wrote books about him, and Kurzke traces their careers.  But he does not explain why Erika, Klaus and Golo were homosexual (his grandson Frido, the model for Nepo in Doctor Faustus, also “showed all the signs of homosexuality”); why Erika, Klaus and Michael were addicted to drugs; and why Klaus and Michael killed themselves.

Mann made an astonishingly swift and effective adjustment to America—first in Princeton, then in California.  His name sounded English.  He knew the language, had the fame and prestige of the Nobel Prize, was married to a handsome and charming wife, had talented children with literary reputations of their own, received the powerful patronage of Agnes Meyer, was a friend of President Roosevelt and had a bestseller when Joseph the Provider was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club.  Kurzke says nothing about the brilliant circle of émigrés in Los Angeles—Heinrich Mann, Bert Brecht, Franz Werfel, Arnold Schönberg—who gathered in the salon of Greta Garbo’s screenwriter Salka Viertel.  Kurzke’s weak on the influence of Mann’s fourteen years (1938-52) in America (“he eats pancakes with maple syrup. . . . America democratically loosens up his somewhat stiff manner”), and underestimates Thomas’ hatred of Heinrich’s alcoholic, sluttish and suicidal wife.

In America Mann wrote Doctor Faustus (1947), perhaps his greatest novel, in which autobiography, Faustian myth, Lutheran theology, Shakespearean parody, Nietzchean pathology, atonal music theory and Nazi history all coalesce.  The musical, military,  pathological and political themes brilliantly merge at the end of the novel as the four stages of Adrian’s disease—migraines, infection, remission and collapse—tragically fuse with Germany’s predisposition to Reformation-inspired demonology, choice of Nazism, decade of military conquest and apocalyptic self-destruction.

Mann’s intellectually complex and demanding fiction, filled with intriguing symbols and allusions, raises many provocative questions.  What makes an artist?  Why is he opposed to conventional society?  Why must he suffer?  How does he create?  How is he inspired by “dangerous” music?  How is disease related to art?  He was a man of magnanimity and intelligence whose mind, harnessing the threatening demons of his time, remained creative and alert until the final hour.

All the photos on the dust jackets of these biographies portray Mann as pensive, serious and dignified from youth to slim well-preserved old age:

Winston, 1900, age 25.  Just before Buddenbrooks, the handsome Mann stands erect and has dark hair, broad forehead and full mustache.  He wears a high stiff collar, silk cravat and smartly cut jacket, and casually places his hands in his pockets.

Hamilton, 1902, age 27. Heinrich with pointed goatee stands above and gazes down on Thomas, who looks away from—and will soon surpass—him.  Thomas is seated facing left, with his hands crossed on his knees and his head turned toward the camera.

Kurzke, 1920, age 45.  In this grainy photo Mann is seated on a soft chair, facing left and wearing a stiff wing collar and colored cravat.  His eyes are swiveled to the right and his mustache droops over his upper lip.

Hayman, 1934, age 59.  Edward Steichen’s chest-level photo portrays Mann seated in a leather chair.  His face is brightly lit from the right as he faces the camera and moves his eyes toward the light.

Heilbut, 1937, age 62.  Against a red background, Mann is seated facing left with his left hand on his knee and handkerchief extending from his jacket pocket.  He looks straight ahead and, unlike Yeats’ “sixty-year-old smiling public man”, has a rather severe expression.

Prater, 1946, age 71. In Yousuf Karsh’s photo Mann, lit from the right with smooth skin, clutches an unnamed book with the fingers of both hands.  He wears a patterned bow tie and sweater under his jacket, and has a solemn expression with tight lips below his trimmed moustache.

Prater concluded that “a definitive biography of Mann in the accepted sense remains elusive”.  Winston died before he could finish his book, which ended with “Death in Venice” in 1911.  Hamilton focused on the brothers.  Prater emphasized the political work after 1933.  Heilbut, determined to “out” Mann, trailed off after the early 1930s.  Kurzke was poorly structured, ponderous and inaccurate.  Hayman was the most perceptive and complete.

Mann’s fiction came from an intensely private inner life.  At the same time, as an exile and custodian of all that was best in German culture, he assumed a public role.   The merging of the personal, literary and political makes him a fascinating subject, too complex to be understood by a single biographer.  He needs a composite of all six lives to fully comprehend his genius.  Mann’s impressive combination of intellectual brilliance, superb style, profound themes, artistic perfection, political commitment and sixty years of creative life give him fair claim to be the greatest novelist who ever lived.

Jeffrey Meyers met Katia, translated Golo, corresponded with Elisabeth, and befriended Michael at Harvard and Berkeley.  In Venice, when he was seventeen, he took the photo of the hearse gondola on the dust jacket of his book Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes (2014).

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