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Chapter Twelve. Thomas Mann in America
- Northwestern University Press
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183 CHAPTER TWELVE Thomas Mann in America I Thomas Mann and Vladimir Nabokov were both exiles, from Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia, before their second exile in the United States. Both authors came from wealthy patrician backgrounds, but lost almost everything when they were compelled to leave their native lands: books, possessions, houses, money, publishers, audience, friends and citizenship. Both were impressively learned, and had sophisticated and devoted Jewish wives who chauffeured, helped and protected them. After leaving Europe, both established a new life in America: Mann from 1938 to 1952, Nabokov from 1940 to 1961. Both returned to Europe to live in Switzerland—Mann for political reasons, Nabokov after he’d earned enough money to give up teaching. Mann’s postwar return to a comfortable villa in Germanspeaking Zurich for the last three years of his life reprised the five prewar years he’d spent there. Nabokov, who’d lived in Berlin and in Paris, settled into a luxurious hotel suite in French-speaking Montreux. Mann’s daughter Erika and Nabokov’s son Dmitri provided valuable assistance when their fathers were alive and kept the flame of their reputations burning after their deaths. But there were also important differences, and Thomas Mann was in a much more advantageous position. Both his names sounded American and made it easier for him to fit into a new country (things would have been more difficult if he’d been named, like Hitler’s father, Alois Schicklgruber). Mann was distinguished looking and had a beautiful wife to whom, de- spite his strong attraction to handsome young men, he remained faithful. His talented older children, Erika and Klaus, were also well-known writers . Mann, who knew some English, had the dignity of a Spanish cardinal and the aura of a German general. He’d won the Nobel Prize in 1929, enjoyed an international reputation and had a prestigious American publisher , Alfred Knopf, who was allowed to call him “Tommy.” He was still comparatively well off, earned substantial fees from lecture tours, and built a splendid house and garden in Los Angeles. The acknowledged leader of the German exiles, Mann had influential political connections and was invited to spend two days in Franklin Roosevelt’s White House. After he became an American citizen—just after D-Day, June 6, 1944—Mann spoke at a fund-raiser for the president’s fourth-term election campaign. Mann was transformed from a German nationalist in World War I to a good European between the wars and an advocate of American democracy in World War II. Inspired by Erika and Klaus, who were passionate antifascists, he was a courageous and effective anti-Nazi propagandist in his personal letters, political essays, public speeches and radio broadcasts to England and America. He did not portray American life in his fiction, but continued to write in German— though his books were banned in his own country—and greatly enhanced his reputation with a major novel, Doctor Faustus (1947). (Even Mann could not equal the stupendous success of the novel by the Catholic convert and émigré Franz Werfel, The Song of Bernadette [1942], which also became a popular movie.) Nabokov, by contrast, had published his Russian novels in Berlin and was unknown in the United States. Desperately poor in Europe, he was reduced to giving language and tennis lessons. Living in cramped flats, he often had to write in the bathroom. An expert in butterflies as well as in literature, he worked as an entomologist at Harvard and as a teacher at Wellesley and Cornell. He lived modestly and emphasized his transience by renting a different house every year, but became a citizen in 1945. More dashing and flamboyant than Mann, he had a number of love affairs, and offered his wife the compensatory and pro forma dedications of all his books. Fluent in Russian, French and German, Nabokov had also learned English in childhood and had been educated at Cambridge University. He changed languages, wrote his best novels in English, and portrayed American life and Russian émigrés. He became world famous after publishing 184 chapter twelve [44.197.195.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:35 GMT) the sensational Lolita in Paris in 1955 and in New York three years later. His novels had a powerful influence on American and English writers from Thomas Pynchon to Martin Amis. Though his father (assassinated in 1922) had been a leading Russian statesman, Nabokov, more of a loner than Mann, was not politically...