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In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain

Children of a genius

Andrea Weiss
University of Chicago Press, 272pp, £14.50,

Allan Massie

Wednesday, 23rd April 2008

Allan Massie delves into an account of Thomas Mann's children

Andrea Weiss is very critical of Thomas Mann’s reluctance to burn his boats. Though he too lived abroad after the Nazi takeover, he remained loyal to his German publisher and hesitated for three years to make a public denunciation of the regime. His children were critical too, but Thomas’s hesitation is understandable. He had much to lose, not only his property, but a large part of his income if his books were banned in Germany. The whole family, including Erika and Klaus, was financially dependent on him. Eventually he spoke out after Erika, his favourite child, threatened to break off relations with him if he didn’t. Subsequently he would be the most formidable and committed intellectual enemy of the regime.

Weiss, who gives the impression of disliking Thomas, also criticises his failure, or inability, fully to appreciate Klaus and his work. Fair enough: she is reflecting what Klaus himself felt, even though he always admired the work of the Magician (the name by which the children referred to their father). Certainly once Thomas’s infatuation with the boy’s adolescent beauty faded — ‘I find it very natural that I should be in love with my son’, he wrote in his diary — he was often exasperated by Klaus’s fecklessness, his drug-addiction, his financial dependence. (It was however usually Katia who subsidised Klaus, the child she doted on.) But many fathers would have been less tolerant of such a wayward son, and he did tell Klaus, ‘come home whenever you are unhappy or forlorn’. It may be that he was irritated by Klaus’s open and guilt-free homosexuality, or rather perhaps jealous of it, given how closely he guarded and suppressed his own pederastic inclinations.

They moved to America, which represented to them the land of the free. Erika had a good war, as a journalist, in London during the Blitz for instance; Klaus a more difficult one, before eventually being accepted into the American army and being granted American citizenship. Both were spied on by the FBI, in its usual disgusting fashion, suspected as sexual perverts and, as ‘premature anti-Fascists’, thought to be Communists. Neither was, Klaus rejecting Communism on account of its materialism and the Soviet Union’s persecution of homosexuals.

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