In the course of a lifetime of fiction reviewing, I have come to the conclusion that, though my colleagues are prepared doggedly to persevere with the reading of a novel from its muddled opening to its inconsequential end, they will read no more than four or five stories in a collection. What always guides them in this lazy choice is that one of the favoured stories will be the title one and another the most substantial. Since the title story is also the most substantial — in effect a novella — in Allan Massie’s Klaus, one can be absolutely certain that it will be the one on which every reviewer, including myself, chiefly concentrates.
The central figure here is Klaus Mann, oldest of the six children of the novelist Thomas, a figure of such intellectual grandeur that his son felt constantly intimidated by him as he compared his granite genius with his own mercurial talent. With his sister Erika, later to enter into a marriage of convenience with W. H. Auden, Klaus had an almost incestuous relationship during their early years. The third important figure in a life of homosexuality, drug-addiction and opposition to the Nazis, was the great German actor Gustaf Gründgens, Erika’s first husband, whom she divorced.
A profound dissatisfaction with a life that he was impotent to change drove Klaus from country to country. After Paris, his initial place of exile from the Nazis, he sojourned briefly in Switzerland and the Netherlands before becoming a citizen of Czechoslovakia and then the USA. Finally, he was back in postwar Germany as a newspaper reporter. It was in Cannes in 1949 that he killed himself with an overdose of heroin at the early age of 42.
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