Klaus was the eldest son of Thomas Mann, who now seems (to me anyway) more and more certainly one of the two or three greatest novelists of the 20th century. The family were close. Though Klaus was quicker than his father to come out in open opposition to the Nazis, and this made him sometimes impatient, his love and respect for ‘the Magician’ (the name by which the Mann children always referred to Thomas) were never diminished. He was himself a talented journalist, editor, dramatist, song-writer and novelist. Mephisto, if less substantial than his father’s greatest novels, is a brave and brilliant work, the opening chapter describing a grand ball held to celebrate Goering’s 43rd birthday is a wonderful piece of bravura and biting sarcasm. The Nazi leaders are unmistakable, though not identified by name:

As for Goering,

Mephisto was written in 1936 and published in Amsterdam. The central figure was a thinly-disguised portrait of the actor Gustaf Grundgens, once briefly married to Erika Mann, once a Communist, now Goering’s protégé. Klaus Mann said his purpose was ‘to analyse the abject type of treacherous intellectual who prostitutes his talent for the sake of some tawdry fame and transitory wealth’. The type, found under all dictatorships is not extinct today, present also in democracies. It took courage for a German to write and publish such a novel in 1936, even without Germany. We are all — of course — anti- Fascists today. Things were different then. Klaus Mann’s fate, if the Nazis had ever caught up with him, doesn’t bear thinking on.

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