House of Exile | Evelyn Juers | Review by The Spectator

In his time, Heinrich Mann was considered one of Germany’s leading writers and intellectuals. Unlike his rivalrous younger brother Thomas, who always put his literary career before any other consideration, Heinrich was an early and outspoken critic of the Nazis, and so forced to leave Germany in February 1933. He was based for several years in the south of France, while travelling around the world to denounce the regime he had left behind, and he eventually emigrated to America in 1940, settling in Los Angeles. Unlike many European emigrants who thrived in the Californian sun, Mann did not adapt well to transplantation. He was already an old man at 69, with his best work behind him. His wife committed suicide in 1944, and he died six years later, having just booked his passage to Berlin for the opening of East Germany’s new Academy of Arts, which had elected him president.

It is a nice irony that Mann is now chiefly remembered as the author of Professor Unrat (1905), the novel on which Josef von Sternberg’s classic 1930 film The Blue Angel was based. It tells the story of a 57-year-old teacher who becomes infatuated with a much younger cabaret performer, marries her and has his life ruined. The Mann family feared that life was imitating art when in 1929 Heinrich took up with Nelly Kroeger, a nightclub hostess 30 years his junior. The insufferably pompous and self-regarding Thomas in particular was horrified by his brother’s involvement with a woman he thought both coarse and stupid.

In her extraordinary House of Exile, Evelyn Juers persuasively argues that, far from being the stock figure she has often been reduced to in biographical accounts of the Mann brothers, Nelly was in fact a courageous and resourceful young woman who, until overtaken by mental illness, made Heinrich extremely happy. It was largely thanks to Nelly that Mann managed to escape the Nazis: she stayed behind in Berlin when he fled Germany the day before his flat in Fasanenstrasse was raided, and was several times arrested and interrogated. She subsequently joined him in Nice, where the couple married in September 1939. The following year, after the fall of France, she managed to get her by now elderly husband safely over the Pyrenees on foot into Spain, thence to Lisbon and onto a ship for New York.