Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann

by Frederic Spotts

Overview

Son of the famous Thomas Mann, homosexual, drug-addicted, and forced to flee from his fatherland, the gifted writer Klaus Mann’s comparatively short life was as artistically productive as it was devastatingly dislocated. Best-known today as the author of Mephisto, the literary enfant terrible of the Weimar era produced seven novels, a dozen plays, four biographies, and three autobiographies—among them the first works in Germany to tackle gay issues—amidst a prodigious artistic output. He was among the first to take up his pen against the Nazis, as a reward for which he was blacklisted and denounced as a dangerous half-Jew, his books burnt in public squares around Germany, and his citizenship revoked. Having served with the U.S. military in Italy, he was nevertheless undone by anti-Communist fanatics in Cold War-era America and Germany, dying in France (though not, as all other books contend, by his own hand) at age forty-two. 

Powerful, revealing, and compulsively readable, this first English-language biography of Klaus Mann charts the effects of reactionary politics on art and literature and tells the moving story of a supreme talent destroyed by personal circumstance and the seismic events of the twentieth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300220971
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	04/26/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	392
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Frederic Spotts is an independent scholar who has written widely on cultural topics and on German and Italian politics. He is the author of Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, among other books, and is the editor of the letters of Leonard Woolf. He lives in France.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations viii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

1 First Writings 1906-24 5

2 First Scandals 1924-28 29

3 First Drugs 1929-32 47

4 Fleeing Hitler 1933 62

5 Homosexualities 1934-35 85

6 Lecturing to Americans 1936-37 106

7 Stalin's Agent 1938-39 127

8 Farewell to Germany 1940-41 151

9 A New Identity 1942 177

10 'Misplaced' 1943 197

11 German Problem Children 1944-45 216

12 The Shadow Falls 1946-47 247

13 Todessehnsucht 1948 263

14 Death in Cannes 1949 283

Epilogue 300

Notes 312

Bibliography 327

Filmography 328

Index 329

Editorial Reviews

The title of Frederic Spotts's biography of Klaus Mann is Cursed Legacy, and on the book's first page he enumerates the "jinxes" that defined Mann's life. He was an exile, one of the thousands of intellectuals forced out of Germany when Hitler took power in 1933. He was a drug addict who alternately fought and surrendered to the lure of morphine and cocaine. He was unashamedly gay, at a time when homosexuality was still a crime and a scandal almost everywhere. He was suicidal, confiding endlessly in his diary about his longing for death. When his death finally came, in a Cannes hotel room in 1949, it's impossible to say which of his demons was responsible — it could have been suicide, an accidental overdose, or simply the surrender of a body and spirit beaten down by decades of misfortune.

But the number one jinx that Klaus Mann suffered, the "legacy" that Spotts considers the worst of all, is that he was the son of Thomas Mann. Being a Mann meant that Klaus had opportunities almost anyone would envy. He became a published author in his teens, a European celebrity in his twenties, and spent his whole life among the cultural elite of Europe and America. Yet, as in a Greek myth, literary fame was dangled in front of his nose only to be snatched away when he tried to grasp it. He wrote many books, but few of them were successful, and he never came close to matching his father's achievements. Even today, when Klaus's name is recognized at all, it is primarily for being his father's son.

A biographer usually turns into either his subject's enemy or his defense attorney. Spotts adopts the latter approach: all of Klaus's misery and failures, and they were numerous, are chalked up not to his own tragic flaws but to the baleful influence of his father. There can be no doubt that, as a father, Thomas Mann left as much to be desired as most other great writers, from Dickens to Bellow. His six children mostly feared and hated him; the family atmosphere can be deduced from the fact that they referred to him not as Father but as Der Zauberer, "the Magician," an uncanny name for a remote and powerful figure. Klaus seldom confronted his father openly, but he did confide his feelings of hurt and rejection to his diary: "I feel very strongly and not without bitterness The Magician's utter coldness toward me. Whether sympathetic or petulant (in a very strange way 'irritated' by the existence of a son) never interested, never in a serious way concerned about me. His general lack of interest in human beings is especially strong toward me."

Things might have been easier for Klaus if he had chosen, like several of his siblings, to pursue a career in music or law — fields remote from his father's domain. But as Spotts shows, the one thing Klaus never doubted was that he was born to be a writer. He was hired by a newspaper as a theater critic at the age of eighteen, and he never looked back. He wrote voluminously, even under the most adverse circumstances — plays, memoirs, novels, biographies, and journalism. Today, virtually none of this work is known outside Germany, with the exception of his roman à clef Mephisto, a portrait of a careerist actor under the Third Reich. Spotts does not make much of a case that things should be otherwise: he acknowledges that Klaus's work was marked by "haste" and "carelessness." (Interestingly, in this way Klaus's literary career echoes that of Nathanial Hawthorne's equally prolific son Julian, the subject of a 2014 biography by Gary Scharnhorst.) One pattern that does emerge is that Klaus's great subject was himself. He wrote his first autobiography, A Child of These Times, in his mid-twenties, and his second, The Turning Point, ten years later. Even when he was writing historical novels about figures like Tchaikovsky or King Ludwig of Bavaria, he was drawn to themes of his own experience: homosexuality, depression, isolation, and tragedy. But even if Klaus had been as talented a writer as his father, he would never have enjoyed his father's level of fame and success, simply because he was born at the wrong time.

During the Weimar Republic, Klaus and his sister Erika — who sometimes called themselves twins, though they were actually born a year apart — became tabloid celebrities, thanks to their exploits on the stage and off. If reality television had existed at the time, there is no question they would have been stars. In particular, Klaus, who wrote openly about his own experiences with sex and drugs, became to many Germans a symbol of the frivolity of the younger, post–World War I generation. (Indeed, his own father cast him in this role in his great story "Disorder and Early Sorrow.")

All this, combined with his vocal anti-Nazi politics, meant that Germany became a dangerous place for Klaus once Hitler took power. Before six weeks had passed, Klaus and Erika fled for Paris. Thomas Mann, as luck would have it, was abroad at the time and simply never returned to Germany. Spotts draws a sharp contrast between the way Thomas and Klaus conducted themselves during the first years of their emigration. Thomas, with a huge readership at home, was hesitant to make any political statement that would get his books banned in the Third Reich; it was not until 1936 that he openly attacked Hitler and lost his German citizenship. Klaus, on the other hand, had nothing to lose, and he was immediately and vocally critical of Nazi Germany. "In this hour," he wrote in an open letter to the poet Gottfried Benn, "anyone who wavers will never again be one of us."

By "one of us," Klaus meant the true Germany, the nation of Dichter und Denker, poets and thinkers. But it was Klaus who was no longer considered "one of us" by the far larger number of Germans — and German writers — who stayed home. Life as an exile, even for one as famous as Klaus, was bitterly hard. His books, published by émigré publishers, sold just a few hundred copies. He got two magazines off the ground, one in German and one in English; they had stellar contributors and the highest literary standards, and they lasted only a few issues apiece. At moments Klaus was totally destitute, without even enough money to buy food. His romantic life, which Spotts is able to reconstruct from his extensive diaries, was grim and lonely, a succession of pickups and one-night stands. Even when he gave up hope of living as a writer and decided to enlist in the U.S. Army, he was initially rejected. He had been denounced to the FBI as a Communist, and it was only after an extensive, intrusive investigation that he was granted U.S. citizenship and allowed to wear a uniform.

During the war, Spotts shows, Klaus enjoyed one last burst of glory. He worked as a reporter for Stars and Stripes, hobnobbed with aristocrats in liberated Italy, and even worked on a film script for Roberto Rossellini. But after the war, all his problems returned: no work, no love, no place to call home. Returning to Germany was unthinkable — he was convinced that the Germans had learned nothing and were still Hitlerites at heart — and living with his parents in Los Angeles was only marginally better. The chronicle of his last years is a bitter account of fruitless trips, jobs that didn't materialize, books that were never finished.

"Klaus had judgment, talent, experience, and a dozen other outstanding traits, but no luck," Spotts concludes. Another biographer might come to a different conclusion — people make their own luck, to a certain degree at least, and other émigrés survived harder experiences than Klaus's. But by the time he died, virtually no one who knew him was surprised. That included his mother, who had the final word on Klaus Mann's tragic end: "It was necessary to be prepared for it constantly, and I was."

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and a columnist for Nextbook.org. He is the author of Why Trilling Matters, Benjamin Disraeli, and The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry.

Reviewer: Adam Kirsch

The Barnes & Noble Review

01/25/2016
This absorbing biography draws a three-dimensional picture of the life of Klaus Mann, novelist, playwright, essayist, gay rights advocate, and seemingly the unluckiest man of letters in the years around WWII. Spotts (Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics) reveals Mann as a genius in his chosen profession, who saw his career thwarted on one hand by the rise of Nazism in his homeland and on the other by the specter of his withholding father, Thomas, the intimidating giant of early 20th century German literature. The author traces Klaus’s path from young, dilettantish provocateur in Munich to serious intellectual-in-exile in the U.S., where he tried (and failed) with increasing urgency to warn the public about Hitler. Mann wrote several now-celebrated works, most famously 1936’s Mephisto, a thinly veiled account of a real-life actor who sold his soul to the Third Reich, but Mann died at age 42, in poverty and relative obscurity. The arc of his story is as tragic as the subtitle promises but is peppered with enough drugs, flings, and cameos by famous names that it never feels like a slog. Spotts quotes liberally from Mann’s diary, which, with its references to life as a refugee and to America’s racial problems, feels particularly timely now. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Spotts writes with humor and style, and a great admiration for his subject, which makes this biography valuable for literary historians but also quite accessible to the general reader.”—Jewish Book Council

Jewish Book Council

Like all the finest biographers, Spotts brings history to life. He enables the reader to grasp the deep anxieties experienced by someone whose political convictions threatened his professional livelihood. . . .  Above all he tells the heart-breaking story of an intellectual who stood up for his beliefs in dark times and paid a highly personal price for his politics.”—Anna Katharina Schaffner, TLS

TLS - Anna Katherina Schaffner

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards in the Gay Memoir/Biography category.

Lambda Literary Foundation - Lambda Literary Awards

“Deftly handling a story ripe with psychological and cultural meaning, Spotts paints Mann as a hero, waging a war for truth, liberty, and self-determination.”—The New Yorker

The New Yorker