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Tuesday 2 December 2008

The son of Mann

Allan Massie on the journals of Klaus Mann

He was everything the Nazis detested and feared: Jewish on his mother’s side, intellectual, a Social Democrat, a modernist; also what they, and many respectable people, considered a decadent: promiscuously homosexual and addicted to drugs and alcohol. (He accepted all this as ‘an intensification of life’. It’s interesting, by the way, to see how easy access to drugs then was; you just went to the pharmacy for your morphine). At the same time he felt, like so many Germans, a powerful attraction to the idea of suicide, eventually succumbing to it in 1949. Several of his friends had gone that way previously, half-a-dozen at least being noted in the years covered by the first volume of his Journals.

Despite this, one is astonished and pleased by his resilience and vitality, his intellectual and political commitment. No doubt it helped to be Thomas Mann’s son, to be most of the time free from financial anxieties. But his life in exile must have been trying, always on the move, the model of the ‘engaged’ writer. He was endlessly sociable too, and rarely seems to have spent a day alone. One wonders at the quantity of work he achieved. Despite its being a bare record of his life day-to-day, one gets a keen impression of his character and personality, a strong sense of how one would have wished to know him and would have liked him. A touch of envy too, for his certainty that literature mattered. There are nice glimpses of other writers: Joseph Roth and Isherwood, for instance. For me, this Journal is a very happy discovery, to which I shall return frequently.

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