Thomas Mann's Artist-Heroes

Chapter Thirteen. Family Memoirs of Thomas Mann

201 CHAPTER THIRTEEN Family Memoirs of Thomas Mann I Mann fathered six children in symmetrical pairs—girl-boy, boy-girl, girlboy —between 1905 and 1919. No writer (not even Tolstoy) has been so exhaustively written about by members of his immediate family. Thomas’ wife, Katia, and four of his talented children published books about him, and another wrote a number of scholarly articles about his work. The memoirist always writes about himself, regardless of the ostensible subject. Two masterpieces of English autobiography, Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son (1907) and J. R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself (1968), succeed brilliantly because each author acknowledges the true focus from the start: his relations with his father and what they reveal about himself and his father. Though the fathers of Gosse and Ackerley were both powerful personalities , they were little known outside their social and professional circles. Mann’s family had to come to terms with a more difficult subject—not only an overwhelming force in their own lives, but also a writer of genius and mythical public figure. His children’s memoirs are torn between veneration and rivalry, between a desire to emphasize their father’s greatness and reveal his human failings, to bask in his reflected glory and describe their own development. The bright and beautiful Katia Mann (1883–1980), the daughter of a mathematics professor at Munich, had a twin brother and belonged to a wealthy and cultured Jewish family. Thomas, whose Buddenbrooks had been a phenomenal success in 1901, married her in February 1905. Their marriage was happy and produced many books and children. With the help of servants, Katia took care of the children, but her first loyalty was always to Thomas. Their son Golo writes that during the Great War, when food supplies were short, their father had normal meals and the rest of the family ate less. Thomas was a remote, self-absorbed deity, with an artist’s overwhelming ego, who usually treated the children with benign neglect. Though incapacitated by bouts of tuberculosis and visits to distant sanatoriums , Katia gave Thomas several stimulating suggestions, which he put to good use. She accompanied him on his European and American lecture tours and, with their daughter Erika, handled his voluminous correspondence . In 1974 Katia, the only one in the family who didn’t write, was persuaded to participate in the series of conversations, transcribed and edited by her son Michael, that became Unwritten Memories. Erika (1905–1969), a mannish-looking lesbian, was first briefly married to the German actor Gustav Gründgens and then (to secure a British passport) to W. H. Auden. She wrote and performed songs and sketches, in Germany and other European countries, in her antifascist cabaret The Peppermill. With her brother Klaus she made a successful lecture tour in America. After Thomas went into exile in 1933, she became his assistant and aide. She acted as his chauffeur, edited and translated his lectures, stood in the wings when he delivered them and helped answer questions in English. She was the coauthor, with Klaus, of Escape to Life (1939), which included a twenty-five-page “Portrait of Our Father.” After his death, she wrote The Last Year of Thomas Mann (1956) and brought out the three-volume German edition of his letters. Klaus (1906–1949), a homosexual, acted, traveled widely, was active in antifascist politics, went into exile, edited Sammlung and Decision, reported the Spanish Civil War and served in the U.S. Army. He wrote several novels, most notably Mephisto (1936), based on the career of the pro-Nazi Gründgens; biographies of the homosexuals Peter Tchaikovsky, King Ludwig of Bavaria and André Gide; and his autobiography, The Turning Point (1942). After surviving Nazism, exile and the war, he became despondent about the state of postwar Europe and his own literary career. In May 1949 he committed suicide in Cannes by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Golo (1909–1994)—a homosexual, like his older siblings—studied with Karl Jaspers and earned a doctorate at Heidelberg University. He went into 202 chapter thirteen exile, like the rest of the family, and taught history at St. Cloud and Rennes in France. With his uncle Heinrich Mann and the writer Franz Werfel, he escaped through Spain and Portugal to America. He served in the U.S. Army and taught at Olivet College and Claremont College and, after returning to Germany, at...