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Saturday 30 August 2008

The son of Mann

Allan Massie on the journals of Klaus Mann

Klaus Mann’s Journals don’t pretend to be a work of literature; they are jottings, records of day-to-day existence, full of names many of which will mean nothing to readers today, even, I suppose, to German ones. ‘I suddenly thought,’ he wrote in January 1933, ‘that these notes could seem terribly superficial to anyone who chanced on them, since they consist of no more than facts such as they are, in no way developed.’ Yet it is precisely in the lack of pretension that the fascination of these Journals rests. The volume covering the years 1931-36 (the only one I have yet read) gives by reason of its casual and generally unreflective immediacy the most vivid and touching record of the response of a highly intelligent young man to the turmoil and horror of that time. It was only a couple of days after he remarked on the terrible superficiality of his notes that Hitler was named Chancellor: ‘terrified; I didn’t believe it was possible.’ Nevertheless that night he went to the theatre in Berlin, took a train to Munich and slept well in his couchette. A few weeks later he would be an exile, not able to return to Germany till he did so as an officer in the American army in 1945.

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