The German Patient: Crisis and Recovery in Postwar Culture

Chapter 3. One Germany, in Sickness and in Health?

chapter 3 One Germany, in Sickness and in Health? Fascism, of which national socialism is a peculiar variation, is not a specialty of Germany. It is a sickness of the times, which is everywhere at home and from which no country is free. —Thomas Mann, “The War and the Future” What we experience in Europe is a form of insanity, a paranoia of power that has infected a continent with its hypnotic mania. The shock of war may arrest the psychosis, but the fundamental defect remains. For a hundred years to come Europe will be a madhouse, its inhabitants to be treated like patients. As for myself, I do not care to dwell among madmen. —Martin Gumpert, “Interim: Would You Ever Go Back, If . . .” On Sunday, 10 March 1940, during a brief stay in New York, Thomas Mann made the following note in his diary: “Went with Gumpert to a café on the 60th ›oor. Drank tea. Talked about my latest novella, Dr. Faust.”1 The entry bears twofold signi‹cance. It marks an early stage in Mann’s thinking about one of his greatest works, Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde (Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn As Told by a Friend). It also records the beginnings of a productive collaboration. The recipient of Mann’s preliminary remarks was exiled physician and writer Martin Gumpert, who not only provided Mann with crucial information about the effects of syphilis but also shared similar intellectual concerns. Although it would be three years before Thomas Mann began working seriously on his novel, the initial discussion proved fortuitous. As it turned out, the two men were engaged in similar projects: analyses employing the lens of disease to examine Germany under fascism. 118 In many senses, Thomas Mann and Martin Gumpert were exemplary exiles. Mann was considered the model representative of the Other Germany , standing for the best of his former country’s intellectual and cultural traditions. Both the American administration and the exiled German community treated him accordingly. Acknowledging his prominent status, fellow émigrés called upon Mann to play a leading role in the U.S. branch of the Freies Deutschland or “Free Germany” society, a cause that would eventually bring him into con›ict with another famous but less well-established émigré, Bertolt Brecht.2 The FBI interviewed Mann, along with a few other prominent exiles, about “what to do with Germany.”3 According to one source, the Allies even brie›y considered Mann a front-runner to lead the postwar nation.4 Martin Gumpert was another sort of ideal emigrant , both typical and exceptional. Like many exiles, he was Jewish, a victim of Nazi racial persecution. More unusual was the ease with which Gumpert overcame signi‹cant odds and successfully restarted his career abroad. Gumpert had arrived in the United States in the spring of 1936, and he quickly reestablished both his medical and literary practices, working as a doctor in New York and writing for such mainstream publications as the Nation, Time, and New York Times Magazine, as well as Aufbau and Neue Rundschau. Together, Mann and Gumpert also represented the geographic centers of German exile; while Mann ultimately settled in California , Gumpert made his home in New York. The writers had ‹rst met in Switzerland when Gumpert visited Mann in the early phase of the elder author’s exile there, but their relationship really developed in America, for personal rather than professional reasons. Shortly after his arrival in New York, Gumpert struck up what would be a long-standing if tumultuous love affair with Thomas Mann’s daughter, Erika Mann.5 The two were so often together that brother Klaus Mann referred to them as the single entity “E-Gumpert.”6 Thomas Mann and Martin Gumpert became fast friends, and their tie remained strong despite the doctor and Erika’s ultimate break. It was thus that Gumpert served as the model for the ‹gure Mai-Sachme in Mann’s Joseph der Ernährer (Joseph the Provider, the third of the Joseph series).7 Mann’s diaries indicate that he frequently discussed the Faustus novel with Gumpert. It was based upon this enduring friendship that, in 1949, Martin Gumpert became Thomas Mann’s companion for his controversial return trip to Germany. Like many of their fellow exiles, the two writers were concerned with the causes and development of National Socialism. Thomas Mann and Martin Gumpert...