In Phaedrus, which inspired Death in Venice, Plato writes that when the lover “beholds a god-like face or a physical form which truly reflects ideal beauty, he first of all shivers and experiences something of the dread which the vision itself inspired; next he gazes upon it and worships it as if it were a god, and, if he were not afraid of being thought an utter madman, he would sacrifice to his beloved as to the image of a divinity.” This passage, charged with powerful tensions, contrasts the vision of an ideal beauty, a godlike face and body, a divine and beloved image, worthy of worship, to the shattering effect it has on the lover who perceives it: shivers, dread, fear, madness, self-abasement and self-sacrifice.
Plato’s thought also explains a great deal about Mann’s homoerotic life.
Plato’s thought also explains a great deal about Mann’s homoerotic life. As an adolescent and adult he 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 interesting characters in modern literature. He transformed his idealized longing for young men into Hans Hansen in “Tonio Kröger,” Pribislav Hippe in The Magic Mountain, Rudi Schwerdtfeger in Doctor Faustus, and the eponymous hero of Felix Krull. In 1981 Richard Winston noted the pattern of sexual displacement in Mann’s life and art. Tonio’s attachment to Hans Hansen is soon transmuted into his love for Ingeborg Holm. Hans Castorp’s memories of Pribislav are changed into his infatuation for Clavdia Chauchat. Adrian Leverkühn’s relationship with Rudi is followed by his decision to marry Marie Godeau.
Hermann Kurzke, who never mentions Plato (the only index reference is to a blank page), 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 tries to “out” Mann with what he concedes are “biographically unreliable” novels. In Death in Venice Mann warned that a knowledge of the sources of inspiration undermines the effect of art. Kurzke’s reductive method demeans the power of Mann’s imagination and diminishes his struggle to sublimate the forbidden desires that were essential to his fiction. Mann gloried in the irony of his own self-abasement before the beautiful and beloved but shallow and selfish creatures. In the doomed love of the suspect and anti-social pederast, Gustave von Aschenbach, Mann found the perfect pattern for the artist’s desperate struggle to recapture the ideal form of sensual beauty, to unite passion with thought, grace with wisdom, the real with the ideal.
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 poet Ernst Bertram, the critic Paul Amman, and Agnes Meyer, whose husband was the publisher of the Washington Post, 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 the 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 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, 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 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 his brother Heinrich “must have talked about a lot of things”; “Anyone who wants to be a storyteller must have something special to say”; “An orgasm that analyzes 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 one to reread many sentences in order to grasp the approximate meaning. “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: “Although all the records mentioned to this point bear the stamp of later literary re-formation, we are actually not justified in doubting this statement, for reports about unhappy childhood experiences are not present” and Mann’s Letters “also included a communication to Jonas Lesser, from which Adorno had to conclude that he supposedly inflated himself with pride in a not very pleasant way in the light of the spotlight that Thomas Mann had directed at him.”
A few telling details occasionally enliven the inert narrative.
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. A suitcase filled with precious manuscripts, left behind when he went into exile, was entrusted to their loyal chauffeur. He notified the secret police who, after examining it, obligingly sent it on to Switzerland. 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, Nietzsche, and St. Gregory in The Beloved Returns, Doctor Faustus, and The Holy Sinner; and finally completed the Felix Krull fragment, abandoned for forty years.
Katia Mann was the ideal wife for a writer: more beautiful than Frieda Lawrence or Zelda Fitzgerald, more loyal than Jessie Conrad or Nora Joyce, and more intelligent than all 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 opposed the Nazis throughout the 1920s, went into exile right after Hitler took power in January 1933, and became the acknowledged head of the (mostly Jewish) émigrés. During the uncontrollable inflation of 1923 his father’s fortune and his own savings had vanished, his war bonds had become worthless, and nothing remained of Katia’s family millions but the art collection (her father said he “lived from wall to mouth”). In exile he lost his houses and all of his possessions, his manuscripts and correspondence, his royalties and Nobel Prize money, his citizenship and honorary doctorate, his publisher, identity, and reputation in his native country. His house in Munich was turned over to a foundation dedicated to breeding racially pure Aryans. After he’d suggested that the German idea of womanhood was the cow, his enemies urged Himmler to put him in Dachau. Mann had earned the moral right to declare: “Where I am, there is Germany.”
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 (influenced by Roosevelt’s New Deal policies) was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Kurzke says nothing about the brilliant circle of émigrés in Los Angeles—Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Werfel, Arnold Schönberg—who gathered in the salon of Garbo’s screenwriter Salka Viertel. Kurzke is 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’s hatred of Heinrich’s alcoholic, sluttish, and suicidal ex-barmaid wife.
In America Mann wrote Doctor Faustus, perhaps his greatest novel, in which autobiography, Faustian myth, Lutheran theology, Shakespearean parody, Nietzschean 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 found it impossible to live in postwar Germany.
Mann found it impossible to live in postwar Germany. Though he was loaded down with honors, the abyss remained. After a reading at Frankfurt, he thought: “how much blood probably sticks to all those hands that I had to shake today?” When he went to bed, his hosts bellowed out old Nazi songs. And the Russians continued to use the convenient facilities at the Buchenwald concentration camp. At the same time, as the Cold War frosted up and Joe McCarthy began his hunts for Communists, the FBI compiled a thousand-page dossier on Mann, and the new American citizen expected a humiliating summons from the House Un-American Activities Committee. Believing that the mania for persecution, “the hysterical, irrational and blind hatred of Communists presents a danger far more horrible than the native Communism,” Mann moved to Switzerland and bought a house in Kilchberg, with a view of Lake Zurich and the blue mountains beyond. In August 1955, at the age of eighty, he seemed to be recovering from a thrombosis in the leg when he suddenly collapsed and died of an aneurysm in an abdominal artery. He did not want to be cremated because, he cryptically said, “it may hurt,” and was buried in Fluntern cemetery near James Joyce.
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? Mann’s elegant style, penetrating irony, subtle wit, artistic brilliance, probing intelligence, depth of meaning, insight into the malaise of European culture and half-century of creative genius make him the greatest novelist of all time.
Mann has been well served by his English-language biographers—Nigel Hamilton (1978), Richard Winston (1981), Ronald Hayman (1994), Donald Prater (1995), and Anthony Heilbut (1996)—all of whom are superior to Kurzke and make his book (first published in 1999) seem vieux jeu. The publication of Mann’s Six Early Stories (1997), The Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann (1998), Gilbert Adair’s The Real Tadzio (2001), and the recent biographies testify to his enduring reputation. Mann is one of the rare writers—Samuel Johnson, Henry James, Chekhov and Nabokov—whose life and character, under the pressure of intense biographical scrutiny, seem noble.
Mann successfully fused art and life, enjoyed a long and fruitful marriage, had the intelligence to recognize the errors of his early reactionary opinions and the courage to change them (most German nationalists in the Great War became supporters of the Nazi party), 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 the European exiles, bravely opposed the anti-Communist hysteria in America, and, despite political upheavals and endless distractions, remained dedicated to his literary vocation. 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.
